When Robert
(Uncle Bob) Martin visited us a few months back, we asked him for his recommendations
on Scrum management software. His reply? “Note cards and white boards.”
I feel that this is a perfectly reasonable answer when dealing with a small development
team. While we already know that Agile methodology scales to large teams, I propose
that note cards and white boards do not scale in support of the process. It is reasonable
that anyone in the organization be able to see the current state of a sprint
at all times. White boards do this well when the building has only a few rooms, but
what about distributed teams and the reality of a distributed workforce?
Providing an efficient Scrum planning tool and electronic information
radiator for your active projects can help tune the Scrum process to a finely
oiled machine. Pursuant to finding the right tool, we have recently played with several
software tools that claim to help with this problem.
In order to nail this solution, the software must master ease-of-use in the story
management process. Necessary components of the perfect solution include:
- Mindlessly simple story creation and point estimation
- Drag and drop of backlog stories into iterations for sprint planning
- One click prioritisation of stories within a sprint
Target Process
Target Process strives to provide a little bit of everything to help in the Agile
management process. A sprinkle of defect management, a touch of test case management,
and a dollop of sprint planning capability make a bland cake.
Target Process is frequently releasing new versions and is up to v1.5 at the time
of this writing. This application will undoubtedly evolve to be a more streamlined
solution. The basic tasks required for efficient Scrum planning are just not yet easy
enough to perform with Target Process, and the basic functions that it tries to provide
for testing and defect management are simply too crude.
Implemented in .Net on top of standard RDBMS like SQL Server, and frequently updated,
Target Process deserves to be monitored for the day that 2.0 ships. It just might
be perfect.
XPlanner
Hey, it’s shareware, so that means it’s free, right? Not quite.
XPlanner is a great solution if you are only looking for toy management. The lack
of very prominent Burn Down and Velocity charts are a major shortcoming. It is pretty
easy to use, but in order for XPlanner to really work for you, you must agree with
their version of Agile. For example, you better be happy with providing your estimations
in hours instead of points.
XPlanner is still in its infancy at v0.7b4 and is intended to work with other open
source software like Apache and MySQL, although SQL Server support is available. Obvious
hooks are provided for integration to other systems, like BugZilla, but nothing is
easy. Like most open source server solutions, XPlanner can be arcane to administer
and difficult to set up.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
VersionOne
This software takes all of the tasks that Target Process provides, makes them a bit
simpler to perform, and then ads another 1000 features that you won’t really want
to use. The UI is definitely 1st generation, but first rate at the same time. My favorite
work that was used to describe the application during evaluation was :post-backy”.
No doubt, Version One could benefit from inclusion of some Web 2.0 features. AJAX
would help a lot.
Although Version One is likely to be our choice for a solution at the moment, the
reason may surprise you. Version One offers an affordable hosted solution that comes
in at half the price of Rally Dev. It will likely give us the freedom to explore the
usefulness of Agile Scrum Management Software and not even have to provide backup
services 
.
Conclusion
While we aren’t certain that we have the perfect solution, we do know that we need
a Scrum planning solution. Maybe for now the smart way in is a smaller buy than biting
off a robust, self hosted solution. After all, Team System is just around the corner
and we be looking into how that can be tuned to support Agile.