Agile Project Management Tools Evaluations
Posted on August 19, 2008 at 10:52 PM
At Todobebe we have adopted one of the Agile methodologies commonly know as XP (Extreme Programming). I remember a couple of years ago seeing a book called “Practicing Extreme Programming” and giggling to myself with the thought of “Isn’t programming extreme enough already, what’s next? Programming martial arts and a The coding black belt?”. All jokes aside, I really thought it was some sort of crappy idea by a big corporation like Microsoft or Sun. Little did I know had I picked up that book and studied it at that time, I would’ve been at a much better place to help my team during the past couple of months.
The principles of the extreme programming methodologies are fairly simple. Have the customer (he who holds the stake) in the room to decide which stories go in the current iteration. Complete stories (specially formatted requests) with the direct guidance of the customer. At the end of an iteration, conduct a retrospective, see what you can improve upon and repeat. There is also the concept of having managers, developers, customers and testers in the same physical room, which is not always feasible for non co-located teams.
XP definitions aside, with the methodology comes the need for a good electronic tool to aid in the management of stories, iterations, releases, retrospectives and of course, the beloved (by some) reports.
After some research we settled for Tracker, Pivotal Lab’s Agile Project management tool. It is a very simple tool, easy to learn and use. Composed of one main screen holding multiple containers for Done, Current, Backlog, Icebox, Search, etc. You can show/hide them as you please, the interface is snappy, ajaxy and usable (want any more cliche words?). You can drag and drop items between the buckets, quickly assign points and the system automatically calculates your future velocity. There is also a ton of other little features that I won’t mention here for the sake of brevity. Tacker is free at the time of this writing.
Pictured: Tracker
We have been using Tracker for about 10 weeks and it has been working fairly well. Our team is growing, and we have started to realized Tracker’s shortcomings. There seems to be no easy way to transfer stories between projects. Also release planning is very elementary, the interface does not help with this particular agile practice. Reporting is a bit deficient and time management is limited.
Since then I have done a considerable amount of research regarding Agile tools. Many players, a large array of losers and a few contenders. The last bucket included ThoughtWorks’ Mingle, a very expensive and complex web app, VersionOne a java web application both available as SAAS and self hosted, and lastly TargetProcess.
I have put together a comparisons table containing pros and cons for each application and their scoring categories suited for our needs. Your needs may vary but it should be a fairly good starting point.
Mingle is not available as a hosted solution. You must host the big boy on your own server. At first glance it was a bit disappointing, it seemed clunky, slow, and it requires 2GB of ram on the server to run well. Even if you go with an economical option like Linode you will be looking at a $200 monthly hosting bill. Mingle offers the first five user licenses for free, after that, it will run you $60 per month per user. The application also felt bloated, and not easy to understand at a first glance. Every time I tried to get into it, my eyes kept glancing over all the options. Mingle does have a really cool looking story card board which resembles a white board with Post-it notes on it. Perhaps the my reason why people get so excited about it at first.
Pictured: Mingle
VersionOne is both available as SAAS and a on-site app. This app is very customizable and versatile. The same customizability greatness arose my first concerns about it. It is incredibly bloated. Some nice features like a place to record individual retrospectives and extremely extensive reporting capability don’t quite offset how complex this thing is. Yet it is surprisingly easier to work with than Mingle, don’t ask me how. I did notice that VersionOne is not very Safari friendly, which was a small turn-off at the time, it did work fairly well in Firefox. Version one also integrates with Subversion which may be useful if you are still stuck in the land of non distributed source control management (god help you). VersionOne will run you about $30 per user per month.
Pictured: VersionOne
TargetProcess came to me in a late night google search rampant . I am not quite sure how I found it or what the search term was. I do know however that I had done a lot of searching on the topic before and it never came up. Perhaps they need to invest some more time on SEO. TargetProcess caught my attention fairly quickly with their quick start demo. What was premature excitement heighten as I uncontrollably watched all the available demos on their site.
I have yet to get my hands on it (currently waiting for a trial password), but what I saw brought back the hope that perhaps there is a good tool out there. TargetProcess is both available as a hosted solution and on-site application. At a fair price-point of $25 per user per month it is much more achievable than most of the other solutions described above.
Even though it is a massive application somehow it feels very intuitive. Reports are easily customizable, processes can be changed to fit your style such as XP or SCRUM. You can comprehensively organize your stories into iterations by dragging and dropping. In-place editing almost everywhere allows for super quick updates. Overall the app seemed extremely configurable yet uncluttered. Also available is a public API, support for Subversion integration and a rich story card board that seems easier to use than Mingle’s. I should have the login credentials for the test account shortly and will be posting an extensive review on TargetProcess in the near future.
Pictured: TargetProcess
We will be picking a tool to work with in the next couple of weeks. At this time my heart is leaning towards TargetProcess but I can’t be sure until I get in there and conduct a proper colonoscopy. I will make sure to report my findings and hopefully provide a conclusive resolution to this dilemma.
Correction: VersionOne is built in ASP.NET
Also check out TargetProcess’ new UI
UPDATE - Jan 2009: I have since gone back to Pivotal Tracker for it’s simplicity and easy of use.
Comments
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Very nice write-up, Bruno. Good ones to look at. I especially enjoy Pivotal’s tool. You might also check on ScrumNinja, though that might still be in private beta.
Blessings! –p
Look “Agilo” (from Agile 42), it’s works on Trac.
Also have a look at ScrumDesk.com
I use TargetProcess at work. I mostly like it. There are some UI rough edges, but overall I appreciate the lack of unneeded complexity (as you put it). VersionOne totally overwhelmed me.
You may also want to check out FogBugz. I think we might have gone with it if I had known about it earlier. Very nice UI.
We have been experimenting with TargetProcess and so far it seems to be pretty amazing. More to come.
Hi, I work for Pivotal (not on Tracker) and would encourage anyone who’s tried Tracker to put suggestions for improvements in Satisfaction (http://getsatisfaction.com/pivotal). We use this in feature planning to identify common issues.
Not being able to move stories between projects (given above), for example, is actually a personal peeve of mine and I’d love a +1. We’d love as well to get better reports, so feel free to make suggestions. Today the tool works great in supporting our Agile practice, but we recognize it could do a lot more for teams with different needs.
Hi
I work in my company (namics ag) since about 1.5 year with Targetprocess. We worked first with excels Backlogs and then we did also a small tool evaluation. I’m very happy that we select targetprocess.
We have internally also Jira with the Greenhoper Plugin, which could be also used for agile project, but its isn’t so comfortable like Targetprocess, if you are doing Scrum. So I hope we can still use Targetprocess for a while (integration to jira is available in worst case ;-)
For me Targetprocess is after the understanding of the simple sturcture (if you know the basics of agile especially scrum) a very intuitive tool, which lets you work very efficiently (use firefox 3.0 or IE 7.0 for a very good performance of page reloads and ajax refreshes).
The only problem that Targetprocess could have in future is, that it starts to be a Tool with very much features and a lots of customer, which wants bug fixing and more features. The size and internal complexity could cause the problem that new releases with new features needs more time then before, innovation could stop a little bit. And an other issue could be that that the bug fixing to solve bugs takes more time, that it tooks in the past.
I hope I can still use Targetprocess for a long time and I hope that it will be still the innovative company which it was the last 1.5 year.
Hi there,
I did not want to comment initially, but it seems the thread has nailed some interesting topics.
Indeed we have more and more customers and we spend more time on support, but also the team becoming larger so I don’t think we are dropping the velocity. We are targeting 1.5-2 months releases and (with one exception) meeting the goal.
We are very accurate with new features and try to add them without additional complexity. If you compare screenshot of v.2.10 and v.2.0 that was released almost 2 years ago you will not find many differences. The main advantage of TP is customizability and we are going to improve it.
Yes, it is very hard at times, we have about a thousand of requests from customers and leads. But we will do our best to keep simplicity and flexibility in place :)
Hi Michael,
Target process seems to be a very feature rich tool already. I was pleased to find out that you guys are planning to add support for selenium to the next version.
If there is one thing I would like to critique on is appearance. I believe there are a couple of small adjustments that can be made to the layout such as spacing(padding/margins) and perhaps colors/typography which could immensely improve the looks. Also, honoring transparent gifs/pngs on the logo.
It would be nice to hide tabs like “Build” for those of us developing web apps, for example, not keeping track of builds.
I have actually started writing my own stylesheet to force these changes locally.
Agree with you. Actually we have new design already, but it is hard to find 1-2 months to apply it :)
You may check new design sample at http://targetprocess.com/30/programlevelrelease.jpg
BTW, what are you doing in stylesheet? So far no one tried to do that with TargetProcess :) How are you going to hide elements using CSS?
http://www.rallydev.com/ is also a contender
http://targetprocess.com/30/programlevelrelease.jpg
Hi Michael,
Thank you for the screenshot. That looks awesome. Can’t wait to see it implemented.
Can we see some more?
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We’ve developed a Rails app internally, it’s our pet project which we’re planning to make public fairly soon. If you want to give it a go Bruno, by all means, [Agileista][https://app.agileista.com/]. Suggestions are highly welcome, please direct them to [Levent][http://github.com/levent/].
Congrats for the great write-up!
I just started running an Agile team and am wondering if it is worth using a tool. The team is collocated, 7 members, and currently using stickies and hand-written charts.
I have demoed TargetProcess and liked it. Also demoed Rally and VersioOne.
I have heard some say that these tools are still immature and not worth using. I have heard some say that doing everything by hand is more illuminating for the team and/or simpler (and therefore better).
Does anyone find the planning features of these tools useful? Is it worth having a tool just to automate creation of burn-down charts? Is it worth having an electronic record of past sprint goings-on or will those records never get used?
Jim,
Our team is not collocated. Stickies and Whiteboard are not an option for us.
Jim,
If you are happy with sticky notes and whiteboard for planning and progress tracking, I strongly advice to NOT use any software PM tool.
Interesting post. We’ve used TargetProcess for 1 year and decided to abandon. It’s a very nice tool at first, and after having trialed both Rally, VersionOne (twice!) TargetProcess and others, we purchased licenses for our team and installed it locally (not SAAS). TP has definitely an edge over the other tools we trialed, but still… read on. Problems with usability arose almost from 1st minute. Programmers couldn’t get their own tasks in one place, and had to move between several lists. It was solved with the help of TP support, letting us know we must define the process in a specific way (yes, workflow definition very flexible and you can adjust it however you like, but you must provide the proper participants for each step to get the relevant issues in your list. It wasn’t explained in the user manual). Lists are designed and behave differently between screens. Sort and filter options are different among screen, and you cannot add or remove fields to filters, nor can you have regular expressions there. The reports engine is nice but has many limitations and we couldn’t extract some basic summaries (i.e. team velocity report). We have requested many new features and some were implemented in following TP versions during the year - which was nice. The problem was that these new features were not always fully implemented (which made them unusable) or fully tested. During work we found more than several bugs. One of the bugs was a critical one - all assignments were removed and we had to reconstruct them from backup - a process who took us 3 days! In addition, adding more and more true data to the system made it work real slow. Upgrading hardware and network performance didn’t help. The overall feeling of the team was that we’re the testers of TP and that it suffers from childhood illnesses. In the end, a new development manager was appointed and he decided to use MS TFS (which I dislike, but it was his call). He just couldn’t get used to TP at all!!! So, it’s a nice tool at the beginning, but maybe only for small teams.
Racheli, thank you for that post! Comments like that really help us to disclose week areas in the product.
Many of the mentioned problems will be resolved in near future.
http://20.targetprocess.com/2008/09/targetprocess-future.html
our team here at Razorfish likes to use this very simple tool for requirements called, Gatherspace.com which is making a big difference for us.
take a look at Woodranch Agile Projects
http://wrap.woodranchtech.com
Bruno, Good job on the comparison. You should also add ScrumPad to your list. We embarked on the journey of developing ScrumPad ourselves from our dissatisfaction from using VersionOne in 2007. At that time we evaluated Rally, ScrumWorks, and TargetProcess along with some opensource tools like XPlanner, and Jira. I am sure they have come a long way. Our vision with ScrumPad is “Convention over Configuration.”
Honest feedback would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Syed
Bruno - What a thorough evaluation, nice work. I would also like to draw your attention to Bright Green Projects. Our hosted application will allow agile teams to;
Prioritize requirements, stories and issues in a backlog. Plan Iterations/Sprints and Releases. Build estimates and track your velocity across sprints. Allocate requirements and issues to developers for build and test. Track progress with a Kanban Wall and Burn Down Charts. Store images, videos and documents against all stories or issues. Use an audit trail to keep track of all changes.
http://brightgreenprojects.com
Cheers,
Adam
Hey Bruno,
Great review. There aren’t enough reviewers of project management tools specifically for Agile, which is a shame since Agile adoption is growing so rapidly and those comparing tools could use such resources.
Another great Agile tool that you should take a look at is Agilebuddy. You can easily create, estimate, plan and track your software development projects using this full-featured tool. You could check it out at:
http://www.agilebuddy.com
Hope this helps
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