I recently started using “Jira” with the “GreenHopper” plugin. However, I don’t feel like this is really doing what I want. I saw a cool feature in “Scrumworks pro” where you can run the app as a desktop application. My requirements therefore include things like:
- Must have a really easy UI for managing scrum tasks
- Must preferably have a desktop version that plugs into web version
- It DOES NOT have to be free, just as long as it rocks!
- It must NOT be a butchered app, but rather something specifically designed for Scrum, with a good development team.
- It would also be an extra plus if it can integrate with Subversion somehow.
- It would ne another extra plus if the sprints could send summaries to business owners of the work that was completed. I.e. Custom reports.
Any suggestions?
You could try IBM Rational Team Concert.
Easy UI: Very, especially the Eclipse version.
Desktop: You can use web, VS add-in, or eclipse version, by team member preference. Like I said, I recommend Eclipse (but haven’t really seen the VS add-in)
Price: I believe it’s free up to 10 developers, then it’s IBM pricing schemas. But if that’s not an issue…
(non-)Butchered app: It’s IBM, so it’s not a hack; and it’s built on Jazz, so there’s some extra developer community juice there. While it’s supposed to be able to support both traditional and Agile, in my experience it’s strongest for Scrum. Also, the configuration is highly customizable.
SVN integration: While there’s no official bridge for this, I’m pretty sure it’s been done before (e.g. by Clearvision), and can be done again if need be. Also, RTC comes with its own SCM system – I don’t know if that would work well enough for you to replace SVN altogether, but it might.
Reports: Lots of (somewhat) customizable dashboards and charts. If there’s a way for it to send automated reports, I haven’t seen it yet.
All in all this sounds fairly close to what you were describing.
EDIT: By popular demand, some screenshots… From my actual Production environment. This is going to be long.
This is the Work Breakdown view of my current sprint. You can see that you have user stories, tasks, you can have defects, ARs, risks, impediments, what have you. It’s actually customizable so you can add additional object types, each with its own properties and state machine.
Each of the properties you see can be changed from this view – so it’s very easy to just add a new task under a story, set its estimate and a brief title, and you’re good to go. All in all maybe 10 seconds for creating a new task. Ctrl+S commits your changes (takes ~1-2s).
In fact, I almost never have to leave this screen during a sprint. You can assign work to someone by making the item under their name, dragging an existing item under their name, or right click -> assign to Owner -> their name. You can change states and set time spent (or time left, the view is customizable) from this screen as well.
Occasionally you want to open an item for individual editing, which you can do by right clicking any object. That opens it in a new tab.
You can see that each individual team member as well as the team as a whole has a work done vs. expected. This is based on the release dates I’ve set for the sprints and total work estimated. If you’re doing Scrum correctly, then by the second-third day you’ve already assigned each story the vast majority of its tasks. You get a handy meter for how many items you have unestimated. In fact, you can even filter out estimated items so you can focus on estimating the remaining ones (which again is two clicks).
P.S. My teammates don’t necessarily have good task breakdowns / estimates here. But you get the idea.
The views you can have are many, and can be customized. So if you like a sticky board for your tasks, you have…
I don’t actually use this a lot, but it’s there. You can either view it by bunched groups of in progress, resolved etc. (like the screenshot) which is good for viewing several different object types; or you can do it by a specific object type’s state machine (so for defects you could have Resolved, WNF, etc.)
Speaking of defects, this can integrate with ClearQuest (though it’s got bad limitations if you’re using multi-site solution for CQ). I don’t know if I’d let RTC completely replace a different defect tracking system, but you conceivably could.
BTW the taskboard is intuitive in the sense that you can drag a task from one state to the other and it would update its state, assuming that the state transition is allowed by the state machine you determined.
More views are possible. Another filter I use during sprint planning is “Execution items”, which leaves me only the stories and epics – no clutter under them.
Speaking of “under them”, you could have other types of relationships than parent-child, such as “related” or “blocking”. To do those though I think you have to go into the specific object. Parent-child can be done that way too, but usually you just drag objects on to one another.
I’ll add here a couple of side panel screenshots and then I think I’m done… Because you should get the idea.
Team Artifacts panel lets you browse the relevant objects. Generally for Scrum management that would be Plans, which is where you keep all your work items. The “Work Items” item actually a bit misleading in that regard, it lets you do queries (e.g. “Open assigned to me”), which then appear in a bottom panel. I personally prefer using the plans.
You can also see builds, source control in there – for some teams they are indispensable, for others (like mine) they aren’t really used.
Last screenshot…
Actually got three areas in the Team Dashboard (four with “Builds” not presented here, which I don’t use). “My Open Items” can actually display any query, by any order. This one uses priority. Hovering on any of these displays the relevant items (takes 0.5-1s to think about it), with F2 enlarging the tooltip. Clicking any of these columns retrieves the items for the bottom panel.
Event Log is what you’d expect, stuff your team has been doing. Likewise easy to expand, clicking on an item opens the corresponding work item in a new tab.
Then there’s Team Load, which compares estimated assigned items to each team member’s expected hours left to work in the iteration, as well as total. This draws from individual setting of work hours and planned absences (alas, absences don’t seem to support any half-day scheduling, only full days).
By complete happenstance, I have one team member with no load, one with load exactly matching their expected hours, and one who apparently chewed more than he could swallow. Of course, he just needs to update his tasks, though in this particular case he really is overworked. This dashboard lets a Scrum Master identify this sort of situation quickly and try to resolve it before it’s too late.
(Don’t ask why that didn’t happen in this case).
Performance is also surprisingly good. I’m not sure what they did in their architecture, but it’s a lot smoother than other enterprise solutions I’ve used. By far.
Maybe I should make it clear that I’m not in any way affiliated with IBM, Jazz, RTC etc. I just think the tool is pretty nifty. I’m not yet done exploring it, actually, but for Scrum it seems pretty darn good and I’m happy to spread the word 🙂
Is this what you are looking for?
P.S. There are a ton of Agile tools out there, you could continue to look around. But if JIRA wasn’t good enough for you, then that probably disqualifies maybe 90% of what’s out there which is worse (e.g. Rally).