We would like to implement the Agile/ Scrum process in our daily software management, so as to provide better progress visibility and feature managements, here are some of the activities that we want to do:
- Daily stand-up
- Release cycles of 6 weeks with 3 2-week iterations.
- Having a product back-log of tasks (integrate with bugzilla) and bugs estimated out.
- Printing a daily burn down to make velocity visible. When used as motivator, it’s great.
- Easy feature development tracking and full blown visibility, especially for the sales and stake holders ( this means that it must be a web based tool).
- My team is distributed, so physical whiteboards aren’t feasible.
Is there such a web based tool that meets our needs? I heard icescrum may be one, but I’ve never used it so I don’t know.
There are a few more suggestions as here, but I’ve never heard of them, anyone cares to elaborate or suggest new tools?
1
In our experience, after using several tools, the best one is a whiteboard and sticky notes… maybe several whiteboards and a lot of sticky notes 😉
4
I really think that Trello can help you here. It’s web based, the tag line ‘your entire project at a glance’ is exactly what you are looking for.
You could hook in your issue tracker, with trello to illustrate tasks, and bugs associated. Daily gains could be shown with trello…
Have a look at this page and perhaps contact a member of staff for ideas, or perhaps give this great article a read.
2
I’ll chuck Jira in there with GreenHopper plug in which does white boarding stuff of tasks.
It’s $10 for each for a 10 user license. Lots more for more users though.
I have to say though, Cardboard cards and white boards are still the best way.
Pivotal tracker does most what you asked for:
backlog, burn-down, velocity, etc.
See its Getting Started video and text guide on this page.
Years ago, a group of Agile coaches at Proteus Technologies were trying to find a decent Agile tool to help collaborating our Agile projects with their remote customers. Like many Agile teams, we started with physical story wall but having remote customers make this a challenge. In the attempt to keep customer as close to the team as possible, we tried to send pictures of the board and the cards on daily basis but it created too much overhead especially when our handwriting is not that clear! We then looked for electronic tools but none of them seem to fit. Most of the tools out there are bloated with unnecessary features that we will never use. At the end of the day, we ended up creating our own tool, Eidos. It was not perfect but it worked very well in our context.
Eidos is currently in beta but it is certainly good enough to run a project. We use Eidos to build Eidos and attached here is the screenshot of our current iteration.
Here is another screenshot when we bring up the release burndown.
If you are interested to check it out, feel free to sign up at http://theeidos.com/