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XPlanner – A tool for Scrum – Some reviews

ashish — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:04:48 +0000

Xplanner is a tool used for Scrum purposes, and is being used by a number of teams all over the world. From the project site (link)

XPlanner is a project planning and tracking tool for eXtreme Programming (XP) teams. If you are not familiar with XP software development practices, the links page contains pointers to relevant resources. To summarize the XP planning process, the customers pick the features to be added (user stories) to each development iteration (typically, one to three weeks in duration). The developers estimate the effort to complete the stories either at the story level or by decomposing the story into tasks and estimating those. Information about team development velocity from the previous iteration is used to estimate if the team can complete the stories proposed by the customer. If the team appears to be overcommitted, the set of stories are renegotiated with the customer. The XPlanner tool was created to support this process and address issues experienced in a long-term real-life XP project.

Here are some reviews and comments about this tool from different locations, and should help you make a decision when you are evaluating tools to use:
Xplanner.org (link)
Scribd.com (link)
ohloh.net (link)
agile-tools.net (link)
Thinking in Extremes with Xplanner (link)
javaworld.com (link)
http://borisgloger.com (link)
issart.com (link)
vietnamesetestingboard.org (link)
Journey in Software (link)
XPlanner installation FAQ (link)

SpiraPlan – Agile Project Management System (one review, and some information from the company site)

ashish — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:11:18 +0000

I keep on looking out for tools that can be used for Scrum, and once in a while SpiraPlan would pop up. I did not review the tool myself, so cannot give my personal opinion, but did a lookout for the other reviews that are available on this tool (and there are not too many out there). Here goes:
1. From the company site (Inflectra) – Link to the company site.

At the initial stages of a project, the project manager will use SpiraPlan in conjunction with the business users to determine the initial high level scope of the project, the key features and requirements. Working with the technical team, the project manager can begin to develop a high level release schedule and assign initial priorities and work estimates to the different features.
Once the project is underway, the combined business and technical team work together to develop the iteration plan for the releases, break up the features into discrete stories and tasks and begin assigning the tasks to the individual iterations. During development as the team work to complete the various tasks and stories, the system will track changes in the actual effort to determine if the plan needs to be rebalanced to ensure on-time, on-budget delivery.

2. A great review at borisgloger.com (link)

The Planning Tab is where most of the daily work will be done in SpiraPlan. The Requirements option is the closer that you can get from Product Backlog. A big grid with tons of columns and multi-level requirements, luckily you can hide and show the columns you like, but this operation is slow and annoying. A big problem with the Requirement grid is the impossibility to sort it by any column, that means you can not have a view of a prioritized backlog anywhere in the tool. The requirements have a importance property alowing a scale of 1 to 4, begin 1 for Critical and 4 for Low and the best you can do is filter the grid to see only requirements with a specific importance.

3. A checklist of features at this site.

Scrum Tool: AgileBuddy (information along with reviews)

ashish — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:35:22 +0000

In the quest to find good tools for Scrum (and when doing Scrum for the first time with a new team), it can be a difficult experience just finding the tool that will give you the least tool-side problems while implementing Scrum. As a part of this, I keep on hunting for new tools that make the Scrum process slightly easier, and search for reviews that other people have written on the same subject. Here is some information from the company site (link) as well user reviews:
Agilebuddy is next generation Scrum project management software that lets you easily Create, Estimate, Plan and Track your software projects. Agilebuddy’s comprehensive set of Scrum tools help teams naturally transition from the traditional waterfall model to Agile software development. Read more about the feature set at this link.

Read more from the following posts:
Scrum and TDD use for Creating Agilebuddy (link)
Borisgloger.com (link)
userstories.com (link)

For self-help, look at the following videos on Youtube (link)

Scrum Tool – ScrumDesk

ashish — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 06:56:39 +0000

Even though there are some people who claim that you can run a Scrum development through using a simple tool such as Excel, people do realize the need to have a tool that allows creation and maintenance of a Product Backlog, a Sprint Backlog, as well as tracking down the actual efforts and task completion, and preparation of the reports such as Burn Down reports, and so on.
In the past, this blog has shown some Scrum tools as well as reviews of others, and here is one more tool, called “ScrumDesk” (website). From the site, here are some features:
Projects
Teams
Stories board, story cards
Kanban (task board), Treemap
Planning sprints and releases
Planning Poker
Retrospective
Tracking progress
Collaboration
Integration
Documents with PDF support

Here are some reviews from other sites / articles of this tool:
1. Review at borisloger.com (link)

Once you have your backlog in place, estimated and prioritaized, it’s time to plan your sprints. To create a sprint you just need to define a name a start date and end date. At the planning feature you can access all story cards from your backlog not assinged to a sprint and just drag them and drop in the new sprint area. Very quickly , very visual way, it works fine. Once you have define your Selected Product Backlog for the sprint, it’s now a good time to create your task, you could have created it anytime before that, but it makes more sense to worry about the tasks on this moment of the sprint.

2. Review of ScrumDesk at brighthub.com (link)

The software intends to appeal to a more intuitive approach to project management. ScrumDesk features a special academic and non-profit program, where educational institutions and nonprofits can use the program free for up to 20 users, and for a discount on licensing for over 20 users.

3. Review at freedownloadmanager.com (link)

ScrumDesk provide at any time easy access to collaboration tools including messaging, internet calls, emails, web pages and bug tracking systems. ScrumDesk also support LDAP for easy user management.

4. Review at userstories.com (link)

Export stories, tasks and progres to Microsoft Excel. Call or mail to colleague by one click. Export retrospective ideas to SharePoint so your management can take an action. Easy send status to product owners by email. Data stored in database can be directly accessed by word processor or reporting services.
Direct access to your bug tracking page and project home page. Drag link or text to a sprint and story is created.

5. Review at softsea.com (link)

Everyone can easily identify status of the project using reports that displays typically used SCRUM metrics such as a burndown chart, release metrics, parking lot and so on.
ScrumDesk provide at any time easy access to collaboration tools including messaging, internet calls, emails, web pages and bug tracking systems. ScrumDesk also support LDAP for easy user management.

6. Review at vicman.net (link)

ScrumDesk provides intuitive view on stories (tasks) using index card view and enable project management collaboration.
ScrumDesk is not only for project managers. ScrumDesk connects project teams, team members with customers and management.

Using VersionOne tool with Scrum

ashish — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:09:19 +0000

There are many tools you can use for the purpose of running your Scrum process, with some people even using Excel with a combination of Post-It notes. However, I have found that it makes things more efficient by using a professional tool in the Scrum process. One of the more famous tool in this regard is called VersionOne (website) (of course, VersionOne can be used for other Agile methodologies as well). From the site itself, here are some of the features of VersionOne.
- Built–in support for agile development: Our methodology templates for Scrum, XP, DSDM and Agile UP have “packaged” various Agile practices and principles together in a way that helps guide teams through the process of rapidly planning and delivering working, tested software.
- With V1: Agile Enterprise, organizations have the option to select either an on-demand or an on-site deployment.
- With 60+ agile metrics, reports, and executive dashboards, no other agile management tool provides greater visibility into the progress, status, and health of agile projects.
- V1: Agile Enterprise is extensible via an API, intuitive SDK, and third-party tool integrations.
Learn more with this link.

Some more reviews:
At BrightHub.com (link)
At borisgloger.com (link)
At redmondmag.com (link)
Another article at BrightHub.com (link)