Some time ago, I reviewed several open source Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools (aka project management tools). One of those tools was Agilo for Trac version 1 (which has been updated since my review). Agilo Software, the company behind the tool, has released a new tool independent of the Trac platform called Agilo for Scrum, which I’ll review in this post.

In summary, Agilo for Scrum is a very intuitive, easy-to-use tool. Because it’s entirely web-based and hosted SaaS, you can get started with it in just a few minutes. The interface is designed in a way that it steps you through the process of creating a backlog, creating a sprint, populating a sprint with backlog items (stories), creating tasks for your stories, and then visually tracking progress of work through the sprint. No documentation is necessary to figure it out, although it does have a good quick start guide. While it’s simple and easy to use, it doesn’t yet offer advanced features or support large organizations with multi-project programs, although multiple teams will be supported in the next release. The bottom line is that right now it’s a great tool for single-team projects, and hopefully soon will be great for more complex projects.

Pros

• Simple to use and easy to get started
• Intuitive and well-designed interface
• Great for single-team projects, especially geographically distributed teams
• Nice visual task board view with drag-and-drop functionality

Cons

• Each license/instance supports only a single backlog
• Cannot attach files to backlog items or tasks
• No API nor data import/export
• Defects are not included as a specific type of backlog item

Screen shots

Feature Summary

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a partner of Agile42, the company that develops Agilo Software. I’ve done my best to write an impartial review.

Jira dashboard widgets and the Rapid Board both can be built from any Jira query (JQL). It’s often useful to create a report or rapid view board that reports on the current sprint, or latest sprint. Here is the JQL that will show all issues in the current sprint (Fix Version) for a project named ‘WEB’, using the latestReleasedVersion() function:

project = WEB AND fixVersion > latestReleasedVersion(“WEB”) order by “Project Rank” ASC

There is a catch: you must manage your project’s versions so they are listed in the correct, reverse chronological order. Project administrator rights are required to do this, and it’s done on the ‘manage versions’ page.  Note that the versions on this page must be in reverse chronological order, with newest at top, and oldest at bottom. You must also use the Jira ‘release’ function to release (close out) versions/sprints when they’re finished.

I previously blogged about using Jira with some open source tools for managing agile projects, and concluded that it was not a great solution – without GreenHopper. I’ve been using the latest version of Jira with the GreenHopper agile plugin extensively now, and I like it. It is lacking some features, which I’ll describe later, but here is an overview of the main functionality.

The first thing I like is the Planning Board view, which is aimed at Product Owners who spend lots of time ranking and re-ranking backlog items. The GreenHopper planning board allows you to drag and drop items to either change their rank or to move them from the backlog into a particular iteration or sprint (version, in Jira lingo).

For the development team, GreenHopper’s Task Board view is just that – it simulates the physical task board that so many co-located teams use. It’s easy to drag the virtual cards to columns to update their status, just like you would do with a physical board. Very nice. It also does something you can’t quite do with sticky notes; double click to see more information, or click on the item ID to see all the detail.

An advantage of GreenHopper over sticky notes on the wall is that your burn down charts are calculated automatically: in hours, number of items, and story points. The screen images below show these. The red line is the ideal burn down and the green line is the actual.

Are you a bleeding-edge adopter of kanban? GreenHopper is decent for that. The columns on your kanban board are customizable, so you can create any columns you want. You can also set a WIP limit for each column. You can’t, however, set up horizontal “swim lanes” for different service level agreements (SLAs), such as a row for items that need to be expedited.

The Jira dashboard also offers a reasonable approximation of the cumulative flow diagram (CFD) that replaces burn downs in a lean / kanban process. It does show items created vs. resolved, but it doesn’t graph items in-progress. The chart also counts sub-tasks as items, which you may not want.

Above: Almost a cumulative flow diagram. Close, but no cigar.

GreenHopper is an add-in to Jira, so you still get all of the Jira functionality unchanged. Like Jira itself, GreenHopper is extensively configurable; almost annoyingly so because there are so many options it’s hard to know what to do with them. Fortunately the default configuration is reasonable, although there are some setup steps required to enable item ranking, which is so fundamental that it should have been done out-of-the-box.

What is it lacking?

1. If you’re a large organization with a portfolio of inter-related projects, Jira + GH doesn’t do much to show you the big picture across multiple projects.
2. Although you have a hierarchy of versions, such as a release containing multiple sprints (described here), it doesn’t do much; the planning board simply indicates that one version is a “master” of the other. GreenHopper doesn’t offer a timeline view showing the version hierarchy.
3. You can create a hierarchy of backlog items, for example to have large-scale epics that contain many user stories, as described here. However, this feature isn’t enabled by default and requires an adminstrator to configure it. As an alternative, or in addition to the “epic” feature, you can create associations between items for this purpose, but there is no easy way to visualize the relationships. There is free task hierarchy plug-in that will show the hierarchy, but only for one top-level item at a time. 

Overall, especially for smaller teams without portfolio management needs, I give the tool high marks.

I authored a comparison of five open source agile project management tools: Agilefant, IceScrum, Agilo, eXPlainPMT, and XPlanner. The article is posted on Open Logic’s Wazi site. I welcome your feedback!

Is it a challenge to find a meeting time that works for your whole team? If your team is distributed and not all using the same calendar system (e.g. Microsoft Exchange Server), you may not be able to view everyone’s calendar. Enter www.diarised.com – a free online site where you can propose multiple meeting times and all the participants can select the dates & times they prefer. As organizer, you can then see which times receive the most votes.

A few things I don’t like about it:

• You must enter each person’s name and email address individually. There is no way to paste in a list of multiple email addresses.
• There is no timezone information – receipts will need to know what timezone the organizer meant.

Can’t complain for a free service, though.

Although agile development was originally intended for small, co-located teams, many organizations have now successfully extended agility to multiple teams in distributed locations. The only one of the 12 core agile principles that is contrary to distributed teams is that the most effective method of conveying information is face-to-face conversation. One of the biggest challenges with distributed teams is overcoming the barriers to communication and collaboration. Here are some of the tools I’ve found useful for that purpose.

• If you’re using a physical task board at each location, post digital photos of each board on your wiki daily. Better yet, keep a web cam pointed at your task board at all times so remote teams can see it whenever they want.
• Did I mention a wiki? Make it as easy as possible for teams to capture and share written information with a wiki or intranet. Host your own mediawiki, use Confluence, Sharepoint, etc. Or let someone else host it, SaaS-style – plenty of companies offer this service.
• File sharing and collaboration sites. Google Sites and Google Docs is a powerful, free combo for teams to share information. Box.net is another hosted file sharing solution.
• If you’re sharing large files between locations, you’ll probably need an (S)FTP or SCP server.
• Full-duplex speaker phones are a must-have so you can hear all of the conversation.
• Each team member should have a decent quality headset for clear, hands-free audio on one-on-one calls.
• Video conferencing. Many studies show that the majority of information conveyed in a conversation is non-verbal. WebEx allows up to 6 video feeds in a conference. PalTalk is free and it allows a video conference with up to 10 participants. There are many other reasonably-priced video conferencing services, such as iVisit and Megameeting.
• Virtual white boards. Nothing beats a white board for a design session or brainstorming. Scriblink, Skrbl, and Dabbleboard all offer free online whiteboards.
• Web conferences with freehand drawing/whiteboard tools. Readytalk has a great feature for drawing right on top of the shared screen in a web presentation.
• Online Planning Poker for estimating work. Thanks to Mike Cohn!
• Scrumworks – the free basic edition is very slick and intuitive for all the basic needs. The Pro version has lots more to offer. I prefer Scrumworks over XPlanner.
• Rally – the free community edition has limited functionality and supports up to 10 users, and the Enterprise edition is very rich and sophisticated if you have greater needs. VersionOne is a competitor to Rally with similar features and editions, but I don’t have personal experience with it.
• Jira? As I wrote in an earlier post, with some free add-ins you force-fit Jira into an agile process, but it’s not ideal. Greenhopper is a reasonably-priced agile add-in for Jira that beats the free add-ins.
• TangyOrange is an online agile task board for less than $5 per month, but it doesn’t have the agile project management features of the other tools.

I previously blogged about trying to use Atlassian Jira as an agile project management tool. My current client already uses Jira across multiple projects and they are reluctant to change tools or spend for new tools. We use Jira “versions” to define iterations. Jira items without a “Fix for version” are part of the product backlog. We installed the free Jira plug-in Custom Issue Order which lets you set the absolute order (rank) of items in a list. Here’s a screen shot of it in action, with the “Rank” column added.

We also installed the free Agile Velocity Tracking plug-in.

So far, I must say I’m not particularly happy with the results. It works, but I find myself yearning for a tool that was truly designed to accomodate agile development. Some specific things I don’t like:

• I can’t drag and drop items to change list order. As a product manager, I’m frequently re-ordering the backlog and it needs to be fast and painless. With the Custome Issue Order plug-in, you have to move an item one position up or down, or type in it’s new rank, but either way the page refreshes each time. With a Jira server on the opposite side of the planet, the latency is killing me.
• If the backlog is too long, each user must customize the page size to be able to view all items in the list. When it’s split between pages, you can’t move an item from one page to another.
• Suppose the team is starting iteration 3.0.2 (2nd iteration toward release of V3), and a defect is reported on V2.1 that must be fixed in a V2.2 release. You can’t include this defect in the 3.0.2 iteration backlog because it’s based on Jira’s “fix for version” 3.0.2, and this item will be fixed in Jira version 2.2. So you have to manage these items separately.
• You can’t “collapse” a single story to show/hide it’s subtasks in the list. This is a feature of ScrumWorks that I really like.
• The agile velocity tracking plug-in isn’t very intuitive. It might be more useful after our project has more iterations completed, but for now the data isn’t very helpful.
• No burndown chart. We tried a free plug-in from Laughing Panda but couldn’t get it to work. The closest things Jira has is the progress bar: go to Reports — Versions — (a specific version) and you get a graphic like this:

The burndown chart is far more useful since it clearly communicates the estimated work remaining (in hours) and the trend line for completing it by the end of the iteration.

My recommendation for co-located teams is still to use a physical task board. If you have a distributed team, or you’ve tried the task board and have specific reasons for moving to an electronic tool, then I’d recommend Jira + GreenHopper, ScrumWorks, XPlanner, or the free editions of Rally or VersionOne. When I first wrote this post, I hadn’t yet tried GreenHopper, but now I have, and it’s a great tool. Read about it here.

One of my session proposals for Agile 2009 is titled Collaboration Tools 2.0 – Which is Best? I plan to have an interactive workshop comparing the merits of tools like Basecamp, Huddle, Zoho Projects, Sosius, and Google Docs. If you have experience with these tools or others in the same genre, please let me know.

What do you use to create mockups of your UI? I prefer a very lightweight approach using a good ol’ whiteboard or even sketches on paper. You can capture a whiteboard mockup with a camera, or scan a paper mock up. For distributed teams, though, you can’t collaborate very well with either one of those approaches. I just discovered Balsamiq Mockups and after trying it out, it looks like a good solution. It also has a sweet integration with Confluence, Jira, and XWiki.

I’m working with a team that has been using Jira and wanted to see if they could use Jira for the product backlog and iteration tracking. There are a set of customizations and add-ins for Jira that can make it work, as I found at this informative site. The basic idea is to use Jira versions for each iteration, un-versioned items become the product backlog, and add-ins let you fine-tune the ranking of each item and produce burndown metrics.

I’m still a proponent of using a physical task board when the team is co-located, and I think other tools like XPlanner and Scrumworks are better suited to agile development, but I’ll give this setup with Jira a try and report back on how well it works.