Online Scrum Tools - Review
There are a lot of online project management tools. I have selected several of these tools that aim to simplify the practices of the Scrum framework. These tools should have features for the three Scrum roles that makes their life easier. The applications should for example make it painless to collect user stories and maintain the product backlog for the product owner.
Typically it is advised to be careful with using tools because time should be spend on doing Scrum (and your work). We should remember that the first value of the Agile Manifesto is: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.
At the other hand, it can be very informative how the various tools have implemented Scrum and what they see as the best practices. I am especially interested in the question: “Are one of these tools really time saving and therefore essential to use?”
Impressions of the tools
I will not try to systematically test to prove that a tool is appropriate or not. Just my first impressions and I will try to accomplish couple of standard user scenarios like prioritizing the product backlog or defining a sprint backlog and generating a burn down chart.
The selected tools:
I have selected 8 tools that seem to target Scrum teams:
1. skinnyboard.com
2. scrumpad.com
3. acunote.com
4. versionone.com
5. rallydev.com
6. scrumedge.com
7. pangoscrum.com
8. pivotaltracker.com
All of the tools are web based and can be used without installing any additional software. The pricing is for some of the tools totally free and others are monthly paid hosted solutions.
Skinnyboard
Skinnyboard has a simple and elegant user interface. You have to sign-up before being able to try it out. One board with unlimited users is a free plan. $15 dollar a month for 15 boards is also very cheap. So the price is not an issue.
The registration is hassle free and within a couple of seconds I am logged in. The first step is to create a board. There is the option between creating a product backlog or a sprint backlog. This is kind of confusing because Scrum describes it as a sequential process. First defining the product backlog and after it, selecting the user stories that fit in one sprint. It is funny to see that it is possible to Twitter the creation of a board. I think not very useful but the developers show that they are following the trends.
The interface has got cool animated effects and is clean and simple.
After writing user stories, the items can be dragged and dropped easily to prioritize. Moving the items to a sprint is also easy. You can just create a sprint and select the check boxes of the items.
Behind this point things are going messy. By clicking on the sprint, the sprint board slides open. I just wanted to drag and drop a user story to "in process" but it didn’t work that way. I needed to write first the tasks to accomplish the user story. This is actually pretty logical but I can imagine that some teams want only to track the sprint on user story level. It also doesn’t help that the interface is sometimes unresponsive.
Next is creating the needed tasks, I was able to move the tasks to “In process”, “To Verify” and “Done”. It is notable that tasks can be estimated with hours and not points.
There is also a bird’s eye view. It is kind of an info graphic of the progress. It can be useful to capture the progress if there are a lot of user stories and tasks. But I think it should be unnecessary because the board itself should already give that overview.
The history overview is a log of everything that has happened and can be one of the main reasons to use such a tool.
Summary
I like the clean and simple interface of Skinnyboard. It is not bloated with too much features. But there are some essential things missing like the “business value” or priority of a user story. I also couldn’t generate a burn down chart. I think it is possible but I just couldn’t do it after sliding 2 user stories to “Done”. But the most important feature of “having a clear overview of the sprint backlog” is totally missing. I cannot visualize how this should work with 80 user story and 300 tasks. Scrolling through the tasks is not really an option and doesn’t simulate a real Scrum Board.
The tool has certainly got a future by focusing on the essential purpose and features and figuring out how to visualize all the info and polishing the board.
Note
I noticed that Fluid Media has open sourced the core of the Skinnyboard codebase under the MIT License. It is now available on Github.
Scrumpad
It just costs $21 dollars a month with unlimited projects, storage and bandwidth. There is a 30 days free trial registration that I have used to review the application. After confirming my email address I was ready to go.
The interface seems to be understandable. A new project can be created under the admin section. Afterwards the backlog can be created and filled with stories.
The items can be prioritized by drag and drop. The items can be assigned to a team member and the status is shown in the overview. The backlog items can be selected and moved to a Sprint Backlog. There are a lot of advanced actions such as splitting stories and posting impediments.
The interface for creating user stories is cluttered. The tag is used as the title of a story. I also find it a bad practice to estimate the business value and complexity with low, medium, high. I would appreciate it more if the business value was in a currency and complexity with the Fibonacci sequence.
My favorite feature of the tools is the story board. The board feature of Scrumpad looks really nice. You can drag and drop the tasks to “In progress” and “Completed”. It works fast and intuitive. The fact is again that it will look cluttered if there a lot of stories and tasks.
The burn down chart is really confusing. I have not estimated numerically but suddenly I see numbers appearing in the burn down chart. So, somewhere my estimations (small, medium, large etc.) are converted. Yet again it is not possible to generate a burn down chart quickly. I have to go through all the steps and find out which data is required to generate it.
Problems
Are the mails (task updates etc.) really necessary? The tool itself should be convenient enough. Alert mails are in daily work very annoying and time consuming.
Summary
The product is mature and has got a lot of features. But I think it is some kind of bloated. There is for example an online live planning poker feature. While it can be useful, I think that the power of agile philosophy is the interaction between people and face-to-face interaction.
Scrumpad feels like an spec driven product with everything in it and working actually really well. But the designers of the product forgot what the users really need.
Acunote
The feature list of Acunote includes SVN integration and code inspection. I am curious if this is really useful and easy to understand for novice users. There are plans for $49 and $99 dollar a month. There is also a free plan for maximum 5 users and limited storage. After registration, I was really amazed. The starting point of the application is great. Just give your sprint a name and add tasks to your backlog. The burn down chart is updated immediately.
It is nevertheless confusing to jump from the Backlog to the sprint view. I still do not understand why this happens. But it is really blazing fast and intuitive to create user stories and add them to a sprint.
The inline editing works good. Just click on something to edit and save it.
The analyze view is comprehensive and is your dashboard for progress. Again compliments for the designers of the product. Just the needed info in a pretty and clear lay out. I do not understand why I can’t see the typical planned burn down trend. I have read the blog that there is a predicted burn down. But it could be more straight forward.
Summary
Acunote is a perfect example of how to focus on a certain scope of features. The interface works as it should. It is really easy and fast to add a task. The features are limited and that makes the product understandable.
I find it still a missing feature that there is not a simulation of a physical Scrum board. the status indicators should be configurable. It can be enough to have just, “To do”, “In progress” and “Completed”. Also ordering the items by priority and status would be useful. Currently it can only be filtered.
VersionOne
After choosing the test drive option, and signing in, the template for a agile methodology has to be chosen. Next VersionOne displays a clear overview of the Scrum artifacts. It didn’t work in Chrome and I switched to Firefox. So this could be a huge problem for some teams.
I get really frustrated at this point. The interface feels heavy and unresponsive. I filled in the required fields for a product back log item but I kept getting validation error: “The attribute Title is required and was not supplied.” Is this thing really tested?
I fired up Internet Explorer. Maybe it is Internet Explorer only. And exactly. In Internet Explorer it did add a item. But my confidence is already lowered. The interface toolkit just works slow. Normal drop down items have to fetch their content first, before I can select something. There are a lot (too much) of drop down items.
I just don’t need such a heavy tool. Maybe it is perfect for big enterprises with a lot of developers and tens of dedicated product owners on several products. But for me, this is overkill. It is like shooting a mosquito with a Scud missile.
There are 6 main views and each view has got tabs with tons of information. The items on the Taskboard can be dragged and dropped. But it works counter intuitive. Do you see that an item can be picked up? It is a mess of icons and actions all over the place. Is there an user experience designer of this product?
Problems
The application works not in all modern browsers (IE only). The work flow and the interface elements are just not flexible and responsive.
Summary
VersionOne looks like a product with a lot of features. It is really complete and the templates fit the used methodology perfectly. There is certainly know how of the methods and it is implemented by experts. But the interface needs to be cleaned up by an user experience designer.
Maybe the audience of this application is different and it would fit an organization which develops some kind of secured embedded system or a medical application. But this is not really suitable for web development.
Rally Dev
Rally Community Edition is free up to 10 users. Rally Enterprise Edition is $35/user/month and a minimum annual commitment is required.
The dashboard is clean and gives a overview. The dashboard tools can be chosen depending on your needs. I do think that this is not my favorite approach (I do like opinionated tools), this can work quite good if you spend time to configure it.
Adding a new story to the backlog can be really fast by choosing to add only the title. Add with details can be chosen to expand the user story.
The user stories view gives a nice overview of all the user stories. But it is not obvious what I should do with it. I get the feeling that there is just too much to administer. This is one of these tools that keeps you the whole day busy with administering the work and not focusing on doing your work.
Summary
I do like a lot of the features of Rally. Just 4 states for user stories and you can create various burn down charts. It has more reporting options then the most other tools. The hover tabs at the top menu are confusing. If the user hovers over a tab, the sub items do change. You need to get used to this behavior because most tab patterns stick to the chosen tabs items.
It is a mature and stable tool with a lot of features. My impression is that it is well tested and can be used without frustration. But for me, it has too much features. I just want a simple tool to just has a nice overview of the user stories and some sprint tracking abilities.
Scrum Edge
The first thing that grabs the attention is the fun approach. While all the other tools have a serious look and feel, ScrumEdge uses the pig and the chicken metaphor in their logo. They also state that “Only ScrumMasters are required to sign up” which sounds great for me. Getting started is free and adding new users just costs $50 dollar a year.
After signing in, you can use a nice dashboard. Because there isn’t yet any data, I created a project.
That was really easy and the interface was intuitive with animated slides.
Creating stories was also simple and fast.
The next step was creating a sprint. But it was not possible to create the sprint. The “Loading Data” indicator kept spinning. I tried in other browser but it just didn’t work.
I also discovered an open directory:
This didn’t feel good. I tried to find a work around and clicked a couple of things. I finally found the "Setup Wizard". This was just what I needed. I tried to follow the steps. This time, creating a sprint was not a problem. The project was ready. But when I wanted to add tasks the interface was unresponsive again. I didn’t have any patience over and I stopped there. (Tested with several browsers.)
Summary
The tool itself was exactly what I was looking for. A real Scrum based application with only the essentials. But it just didn’t work to accomplish my simple scenarios. I can’t visualize how this will frustrate when I just want to go to a meeting and can’t update the sprint. With my short experience while reviewing, I would not trust this application (yet) to use it for a professional project.
PangoScrum
The website promises that with PangoScrum you will write, estimate and rank priorities in your product backlog through a simple and friendly interface. That sounds really good. The scope of the product seems to be what I am looking for. "PangoScrum Beta" is totally free, it will become a commercial applicative after the beta version. That means its use may be charged. After the signing in, you can see a nice dashboard. It is at the same time a wizard to set up your first project. Just read the explanation and do it. It is amazingly easy and intuitive. This is how it should work.
Creating a product and sprint is very easy. Setting calendar dates is also great. They really thought about it and designed it with the end user in mind. The product backlog is also one of the best of the tools I reviewed. Just easy and fun.
Estimating the effort and business value is also fun. Just click on the icon and choose a value. Prioritizing is also as expected. Just drag the item in the right position. Adding comments is also available. By clicking on the speak balloon you can add more info to the user story. The team can communicate on a structured way about the items. Adding product backlog items to a sprint is also extremely instinctive. Just choose the items and click on “add”. After that, you can prioritize the sprint backlog. The total effort is calculated at the bottom.
Tracking items is straightforward too. You can change the effort and the business value estimations and mark it as done. But what I really missed here is the “busy” status. It should be possible to see which items the team is currently working on.
The sprint dashboard is excellent. It is possible to see the progress of the sprint very quick. The burn down chart is there as it should be and just plain and clear.
Summary
PangoScrum feels really good. Everything is on the right place and the interface works intuitive. The user experience in general is great. The user interaction of the tool is exactly as the end users would expect. The information architecture is also superior to the other tools. The distinctions between products and sprints on a higer level and the detailed information about the sprint is a good choice to keep things clear and easy. I also appreciated the right implementation of the Scrum definitions. This way, I didn’t have to translate used terminology to the Scrum definitions. This makes the application even more understandable.
The developers of the tool seem to be liking to develop the application. It is based on Rails and jQuery and they added their magic in it. It is based on a solid fundament and you can really feel that. I would trust these developers also because they are transparent and have a blog about the progress of PangoScrum and seem to be eager to further develop the tool. The choice of first releasing it as a free beta and developing it mature enough before launching it commercially is elegant and smart.
Pivotal Tracker
I have heard a lot of good things about Pivotal Tracker. It is often pointed out as a solid tool and mentioned a lot on forums and social media as a preferred Scrum tool. What makes it really outstanding is that it is completely free, for all types of projects, without any restrictions. There is also an API available. It can’t get any better that this. After signing in, the dashboard is plain and clear. Just begin with creating an Project.
There is an introduction video if you need instructions and explanation. After creating the project the view is like a Scrum board. There are four rows but it can be configured to the needs. By clicking on “Add Story”, it is very easy to add a user story. It is then placed in the "Icebox". After starting an item it slides to the "Current" row.
The interface is a piece of art. Everything moves and slides really smooth. Clicking panels on and off is a breeze. In short: there is not much to criticize about the execution of the interface.
But the terminology is really annoying and not understandable. Why is there something like a "Icebox"? Is this the default product backlog? And how do I create sprints? Just by creating a new panel or putting items in the backlog? I don’t get it.
Another confusing rule is that items that are done can’t be moved to the done panel. This will happen when the sprint is finished. This is just strange because a physical Scrum board is rarely used this way.
When an item is moved to "Current", it can’t be dragged and dropped to another panel. This is really strange too. Maybe there is a whole idea behind these work flow but this is certainly not what a Scrum Master does expect.
There is a reports section. It is possible to generate useful reports of the projects. The "Points Breakdown Report" for example is quite unique and practical. The progress reports show the entire history of the features. Very functional and handy.
Problems
The workflow is really strange. Why can’t I just use it as a physical Scrum board?
Summary
Pivotal Tracker is developed with a lot of passion and effort. It is elegant and fast.
Possibility to develop and use the data trough the API can give a lot of possibilities. But the work flow and terminology makes it really confusing. While it is possible to configure a lot, it is very different than a real Scrum board. However Pivotal Tracker doesn't declare to be a Scrum tool.
Conclusion
My selection of the tools gives a nice overview of the various tools that can be used to manage Scrum projects. Each tool has its own scope and target audience. While some of the tools are lightweight others are full packed with features.
I was not very positive about most of the tools. Several applications were not solid enough and needed further development and testing. Other tools had bad interfaces or not easily adaptable work flows.
My advice after reviewing these applications is using a simple (self made) Excel spreadsheet. If it is really necessary to use an on-line application I would prefer PangroScrum.
Best Scrum tools
In my opinion, the tools with the best user interface and understandable workflows are:
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1. PangroScrum
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2. Acunote
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3. Scrumpad
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Yusuf