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I have been task to recommend an Agile tool for my team. I am still a month away from my recommendation due date, but I wanted to get started on my due diligence. Our organization have some restrictions.

We can pick between:

  • Version One
  • Scrum Works

I am not ware of any other option we have available. The option of using one of these tool with a wall or something physical is also possible.

I am not including a third option (MS Project), because I already determine is out for this recommendation.

Paweł Wawrzyczek
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Geo
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    Hi Geo, we'd love to help! But as it stands I have some concerns about this question being more of a polling question, which StackExchange isn't really a good fit for. Could you edit the question body and maybe give more details about your team and also ask some specific questions that will help you get some good, quality Q&A answers? As it stands, the answers you'll likely get for this will be no better than any number of other questions about "What software to recommend" that we have on this site. Also, anyone can suggest edits to help improve the question. Good luck! – jmort253 May 23 '12 at 21:09
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    If you start looking for a tool, then you need to ask yourself what parts of your process need a tool. What do you want to solve. You can post such criteria here to get better recommendations. There are also sites that will give you more than those two options, like: http://userstories.com/products or http://www.bestvendor.com/best/project-management but of course this will only complicate your choice ;-) – Marcin Niebudek May 29 '12 at 07:43
  • @MarcinNiebudek - Great suggestion to narrow the focus of the question ;) – jmort253 May 29 '12 at 21:24
  • Voting to close as a duplicate of http://pm.stackexchange.com/questions/8559/what-is-the-correct-process-for-assessing-project-management-tools-solutions. – Todd A. Jacobs Feb 08 '13 at 20:49
  • You have a month to come up with a tool reco? Isn't that a little odd? – Andrew Clear Feb 11 '13 at 05:32
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    Just to share my two cents, I second @jmort253 opinion. This question, as it stands now, won't be much useful 5 years from now, so it can be considered a offtopic. Although I don't think they're exact dup as Code mentioned, his answer (in the other question) fits quite well to this one too. – Tiago Cardoso Feb 13 '13 at 19:01

4 Answers4

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It might be worth just using a physical board initially until you understand what features you might want from a software product (or even whether you really need software).

As far as other tools go, I quite like Agile Zen. You might also want to take a look at Mingle and Rally.

Ben
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    Another +1 for using a physical board. I was a real cynic of the value of a physical board until we tried to use one. The first time the team said in the standup that they couldn't get anymore cards into testing because the column was full and that maybe they should do something to help clear the backlog I was sold!! That is not something that ever happened while using an electronic tool. – dlongman May 25 '12 at 08:31
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VersionOne while feature-rich, has a hideous, productivity-limiting user experience. Things you expect to "just work" take dozens of clicks, with popup browser windows appearing not related to the task at hand.

I wish I could get my company to adopt Team Foundation Server. Does everything VersionOne can do and much more. The non-browser clients are highly functional (unlike VersionOne, whose Visual Studio add-in is a joke).

Not as much an "answer" as my opinion drawn from actual recent experience. Good luck!

Charles Oppermann
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  • TFS has many issues too. Primarily that once you've set the workflow template for a project it's set in stone. Want to add an extra field or process step? Prepare for days of woe! – Ben May 28 '12 at 09:49
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We have been through a very similar exercise recently and there are a couple of things that stuck out for us - if you are looking at version 1 you may be like us, a little more enterprisey.

We have quite geographically distributed teams so good tools for our product owners and our test teams are crucial. Of all the tools we looked at only version 1 and Rally Dev measured up on the test management side, with my vote for Rally simply because of the ease of seeing current test status.

As others have stated, would help if you mentioned a little about your company setup. To be a little clearer myself - we have agile teams with members spread between two countries (cross functional) and we have some product owners in a third country to make it a little harder.

Craig McGuff
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I think the software for agile management must meet one and most important rule, it should be dynamic, easy to use, do not require amounts of time on your daily PM tasks. It should be somewhat like physical board and of course integrate well with core PM functions alongside agile tools like reporting, estimating, team management, iterations/sprints.

VidasV
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