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Greetings everyone,
Which software do you use to manage Agile Scrum projects that aren’t application development? Can you include what you like and don’t like about the product you use? We use VSTS 2007 for our code development but I’d like to use something that isn’t tied to Visual Studio.

Thanks,

Doug

Tags: agile, management, project, software

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Hi Doug. Although I don't intend to respond to every forum post with a link to my blog, I did run a poll on this topic recently and got a great response from nearly 2000 people! See here:

http://www.agile-software-development.com/2009/09/agile-project-man...

If you go to this blog post and click 'View Results' at the bottom of the poll, you will see how many people recommend which agile project management software.

In the comments of this blog post you will also see a list of other agile project management software that got only a handful of votes each. I only removed them from the poll because it was becoming unwieldy with a very long list of tools. Whilst they were less voted for, these applications may well be very good and just have less of a following so far.

Together with the poll, you should get a good sense of the most widely used agile project management software and also a fairly comprehensive list of tools that you might want to have a look into...

Kelly.

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This is perfect Kelly. Thanks!

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Can anyone comment on what makes VersionOne the leader in this poll?

Never used any products other than a whiteboard, but am looking at setting up a fairly large project soon that may require more control.

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Hi Andy,

We tried VersionOne for 3 months and found it cumbersome. Doesn't have nearly as much functionality as Scrumworks.

Hope that helps.

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What do you need the software to do? What are the team's needs?

I recently wrote about selection criteria for an Agile tool here: http://iljapreuss.blogspot.com/2009/07/criteria-for-scrum-tool-or-a...

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Thanks Ilja.

I'm hoping to find a program that will keep me on track within the Agile methodology while allowing me to create simple executive dashboards for near-real time status reporting.

While our DOT NET development team is doing with with VSTS, us non-development project managers need something less code-centric. There are also other PM's who aren't Agile-aware. I hoping to find a simple application they'd easily adopt.

All of your suggestions and the surveys are really helpful. Thanks again!

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In my not so humble opinion, the best things you can use are a release burn chart, hand made with markers on flip chart paper; plus a wall of index cards for the current sprint/iteration. These are not only very simple, flexible, visible and collaborative; they will also spark the necessary conversations that a software tool will obviate instead.

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Hello. First thanks for setting this up, I hope we get a good movement going.

We're Agile SCRUM based, and as such we use a combination of:

Jira and GreenHopper to manage our Sprints, Fisheye/Crucible to manage our code reviews.

R

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We are using Jira, too, and tried GreenHopper for a while. GreenHopper definitely makes Jira more fun to use, but I still find it much more painful to use than index cards on a wall (assuming a collocated team, of course).

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I hear you... we have a distributed team, and we're government contractors working on location at NIH, so we don't exactly have walls to throw cards on. I prefer cards because it gives you something tangible you can talk about. GreenHopper has its quirks but definitely makes organizing a Sprint a breeze.

R

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I think simplest is best and recommend a task board with your tasks and a burn down chart produced daily. This works when the team is co-located. If you are not co-located I have found that a scrum tool which emulates a task board very useful (I have used Jira and Mingle and liked both).

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Great point Ron. From San Diego, I manage teams in Houston and Stamford, CT. I'll look at both Jira and Mingle.

Thanks for all the input and this is a great site.

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