TargetProcess

[08/02/10]

TargetProcess agile project management software supports any iterative development process including SCRUM and Extreme Programming. It powers backlogs management, release and iteration planning, daily meetings, progress tracking, impediments management, people management. Moreover, it provides complete integrated solution for the development life-cycle from customer requests to releases.

Backlog Management:
Prioritize user stories and bugs in project/release/iteration backlog using nice drag and drop functionality. Manage requests, features and user stories easily in lists.

Planning:
TargetProcess supports Release and Iteration planning via flexible drag and drop areas. All planning vanilla is there: features, user stories and bugs in the backlog, color coding of priorities, time line for releases, release real end date forecast based on history data, sorting and filtering.

Tracking:
Progress tracking is essential for agile development. Are we doing well? Are there problems with the implementation in the current iteration? When will the release be completed? All these questions must be answered real time. The only way to have actual information is asking people who are doing the tasks: Developers, Testers, etc. TargetProcess collects time spent and time remaining for each activity from all team members everyday and provides powerful progress information. Integrated time tracking powers accurate progress information. TargetProcess allows you to easily add time via Time Sheet and use this information to show real project progress.

Development Process Customization:
Different companies and even different projects within a company often use different development processes. TargetProcess is designed with the "unique process for unique project" concept in mind. You can create a unique customized process for each of your projects. In addition, you can modify terminology for each process. For example, if developers prefer the term "Defect", you can modify the "Bug" Terms setting to show the term "Defect" instead of "Bug" throughout the project. Each Process consists of Practices such as Planning, Time Tracking, Bug Tracking, etc. TargetProcess allows users to enable/disable practices on a "per project" basis.

Issues Management:
Integrated Bug Tracking makes your development life easier. You shouldn't need a separate application for bug management. TargetProcess supports full bug life-cycle management, bug planning and assignment, automatic notifications, attachments and comments, bug change history, personalized To-Do lists, complex filters, search and jump to bug by ID.

Publisher website: http://www.targetprocess.com

TargetProcess

Scrum Tool

[11/02/10]

From the review by John Hine : http://geekswithblogs.net/jkhines/archive/2009/12/17/scrum-tool-review-scrum-tool.aspx

Scrum Tool is the plainly-titled tool written by the creatively named Zsolt Debre. Even the product homepage is straightforward: http://scrum-tool.com/. As you might expect from a tool whose homepage looks like it was written in 1994, Scrum Tool is currently in Alpha.

Despite its novelty, Scrum Tool definitely seems to be heading in the right direction. It has many hard-to-find features that immediately put it ahead of the pack:

It's a GUI app, not a web app. You are not constrained by HTML, and application responsiveness is excellent.
1. Currently Scrum Tool runs on Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11).
It's built on top of a PostgreSQL database. This means you own your data instead of entrusting it to the cloud.
It has a solid workflow. It understands the relationships between Products, Backlogs, Sprints, Stories, and Tasks.

I'll post some screenshots below. I've only used Scrum Tool part time, but I like the idea of a robust GUI application that is simple enough to work as advertised. If you do check out Scrum Tool I'd note that I had some installation issues with the PostgreSQL database on Windows 7, giving me a "Database Cluster Initialisation Failed" error. Fortunately the fix is simple.

The main GUI:

The first thing to do is to create your Product from the Basic Data->Products menu item:

You can create sprints from the Sprint tab. I really like that the sprint goal and wiki URL are included in the form:

You can add stories from the Product Backlog tab:

Click Add to create a story:

You can add tasks as children of a story:

And of course charts are built-in:

The internal GUI tool I use today utilizes a tree view to represent the Product->Sprint hierachy, enabling drag-and-drop of stories and default sets of tasks. There's some double-clicking to be done in Scrum Tool to drill down from your product all the way down to your task. But I'm really looking forward to seeing what the Scrum Tool team comes up with in future releases.

Personally, although it's officially in Alpha, Scrum Tool seems solid and usable. I'm going to use version 0.06 for my personal development and would recommed checking it out.

PUblisher website: http://www.scrum-tool.com/

Scrumpad

[11/02/10]

ScrumPad Process

Dashboard

The Dashboard feature is available to all Scrum roles - Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and Developers. The Dashboard allows one to get an over all status of the project. You should be able to see

Burndown chart of a project.
Project member list.
Current sprint.
Time information of current sprint by developer.
Commitment borad of current sprint.
Sprint calendar.
Notice board.
Impediments of current sprint.

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Time entry and tracking

Developers can input actual and remaining hours as well as report impediments by tasks. Time Analysis under 'Tracking' is a good tool for Product Owner and Scrum Master to find out how the team is spending time either by story or by developer.

Tasks assigned to a developer.
Estimated time to complete for each task.
Actual time spend in each day.
Time spent on individual task.
Remaining time on individual task.

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Time Entry

Backlog managment

Both story and bug are part of a backlog. Open product backlog includes both stories and bugs prioritized . However, bug has an explicit visibility in ScrumPad. Anybody can create stories or post bugs. Stories proposed by anybody other than Product Owner will be in proposed state. A product owner needs to accept the stories to be included in the product backlog. A story in progress can only be descoped or split to retain the history. The status of story or a bug is automatically updated based on the time entry done by the developers.

Story in ScrumPad inherently supports As a/an "role" can "action" so that "benefits" format. Also accpetance tests are integral part of a story. Stories in ScrumPad is designed to support "Card, Conversation, and Confirmation" style of requirements elaboration.

Sprint backlogs- list of stories by sprints
Product backlog with different dispositions- open backlog, completed backlog, stories with open bugs, and all stories
Bug backlog- open bugs, assigned to sprints, assigned to me, and closed
Story and task cards can be printed in pdf format to support physicall task/commitment board
Stories can be exported and imported

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Sprint planning

Sprint planning is a three-step process in ScrumPad- Scope, Capacity, and Estimate. Each step has a tab.

Sprint backlog can be created from product backlog under 'Scope'.
Available hours for each developer can be determined under 'Capacity' tab.
Stories can be broken down into tasks and estimate in hours.
As the final step, estimates can be validated against the capacity at the individual as well as team level.

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Release planning

In ScrumPad, release planning is a core activity. A project can be organized into releases and sprints in a tree view. Stories can be assigned to sprints. ScrumPad supports "planning poker" style estimation using story points. A story point table is provided by default. Product owner can customize it for the team. Developers can individually provide poitn estimates. Product owner can finalize the estimate for stories based on consensus. Stories and be estimated and moved in bulk.

List of releases.
List of sprints under each release.
List of stories under each sprint
List of stories not assigned to any sprints
A point matrix table.

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Collaboration

Scrumpad faciliatates collaboration in many ways. Project teams can have threads of conversations around stories, bugs, impediments, and projects by posting messages. They can notify each other of any updates to projects through emails. Team can chat with each other and later can refer to the conversation from chat hostory as needed. Also team can capture reprospective sessions to help follow through on recommendations.

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Collaboration

Publisher website: http://www.scrumpad.com/

iMeta Agility

[11/02/10]

iMeta Agility is a Silverlight application for the management of Scrum projects. The latest version (0.8) has recently been released to provide a full multi-user platform online. This Community edition offers 5 users FREE of charge but is a totally scalable solution to any sized team. Please contact us at agility@imeta.co.uk if you wish to extend the license beyond 5 users to accommodate a bigger team.

Our aim with iMeta Agility is to evolve a product through community collaboration that is capable of getting all users up and running on agile projects regardless of adoption maturity.

We are planning to release regular upgrades to iMeta Agility and are really keen to deliver what you, our users, want. So please take the opportunity to contribute to the forum and influence every new release.