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