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About Yojana Menda

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.

Agile Methods Feature Tracking Issue Tracking

Agile Tools for writing Product Backlog and Sprint Tracking

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Agile claims to make product development hassle-free. But as the saying goes the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  In the case of Agile one the biggest challenges is to maintain a Product Backlog, track items picked at each sprint and groom the Sprint Back log along with Product Backlog.

Since Agile is about experimenting, we @Cybrilla follow SCRUM and explored the following tools for maintaining Product Backlog, tracking features and tracking velocity.

  • Redmine
    • Pricing: ₹₹
    • Epic, Theme, Story structure: No epic, theme & story structure. Story has sub-tasks or related tasks
    • Story Fields: Story has a lot of fields, more fields can be added by turning on extra features. All the added fields can also be displayed in the sprint view
    • Issue Tracking: Story has an Identified and On Hold state.  This helps to account for bug fixes and parked features
    • Velocity Tracking: No out of the box support for tracking and analyzing velocity. Just show tasks done and pending in number not points
    • Third Party Plugins: Has wiki support, documents and files support but it is all internal to the system
    • Collaboration: Commenting and notifications on a story is bad since users cannot be tagged. Only notes can be written and watchers need to be added explicitly else there is no way of knowing updates
    • Look & Feel: Looks like a legacy system with sprint tables and rows of stories.  The story fields to be displayed can be custom defined
  • JIRA by Atlassian
    • Pricing: ₹₹₹
    • Epic, Theme, Story structure: JIRA Agile supports the epic, story structure. No themes. Story has sub-tasks or related tasks. JIRA however has only issues
    • Story Fields: Story has a lot of fields but they are disorganized. All the added fields can also be displayed in the sprint view
    • Issue Tracking: Issue can be tracked via basic states but additional custom fields can be added, labels can be added.
    • Velocity Tracking: Basic support for tracking velocity.
    • Third Party Plugins: Has wiki support, documents and files support but it is all internal to the system.
    • Collaboration: Comments and notes can be tagged to users which prompts a email or system notification to the tagged user.
    • Look & Feel: Looks like a legacy system with sprint tables and rows of stories.  The story fields to be displayed can be custom defined
  • Pivotal Tracker
    • Pricing: ₹₹ Free for upto 3 collaborators
    • Epic, Theme, Story structure: Supports epics, themes and story structure. Labels and Tags also exist for categorization
    • Story Fields: Story has limited but important fields. It is difficult to display these in the sprint view
    • Issue Tracking: Story has only few states and there is no way of accounting for bugs associated with a story. One has to reject the story and restart it
    • Velocity Tracking: Very good support and analytics for velocity tracking
    • Third Party Plugins: Good API support to integrate with third party tools. https://www.pivotaltracker.com/help/integrations
    • Collaboration: Excellent support for collaboration via notification system and email.  Easy to switch between projects from dashboard in 1 click
    • Look & Feel: Very graphical and visual display with three main columns: Icebox, Backlog and Current. Each column has rows of story teasers.  Hovering on a story displays the entire story
  • Trello
    • Pricing: Free. Pay per extra feature
    • Epic, Theme, Story structure: Supports epics, themes and story structure but these are custom defined
    • Story Fields: Story has basic fields but it does not have points.
    • Issue Tracking: Stories can have a checklist, which can be tweaked as different states of a story.  This can also help as definition of done.
    • Velocity Tracking: Difficult to track velocity as points can’t be associated easily. One can use Burndown charts API for velocity tracking
    • Third Party Plugins: Integrates well with third party tools
    • Collaboration: Well collaborated tool with member tagging and commenting system
    • Look & Feel: An intuitive display to replicate sticky notes given on a wall. Columns can be custom defined and each story can be dragged and dropped into these custom defined columns