This post presents the results of a selection process
described in the previous post to find an agile process management tool with
which to run our project.
I'm not going to go over old ground but to make this post
capable of standing on its own, here is a very brief explanation. We evaluated a
shortlist of tools that met our cost and technology constraints. We scored each
tool against 11 criteria that described our project management process. We
weighted each of the criteria based on how important they were to our team on our
project.
To see the full list of tools, the explanations of the
criteria and our weightings, have a look at the previous post (http://blogs.conchango.com/gavyndowst/archive/2009/08/04/reviewing-agile-process-management-tools.aspx).
Now on to the results and we'll start with the overall
figures. Both the weighting adjusted and non-adjusted figures are represented
but, as you can see, the correlation is pretty close, ScrumNinja being the
notable exception as one of the main areas it drops points on has a low weighting for us (team management).
The two winners, of those
tested, are Version One and Agile on Demand. These two products very
much sit on their own in the upper tier of products that do everything. They
score very highly because they simply tick every box. This comprehensiveness
does make them quite complicated to setup and use though. If you are running
several projects with numerous teams and multiple releases then I'd say these
tools are a good place to start. The effort spent getting them set up will be
rewarded. Almost making it into this upper tier is XPLive which is also very full featured. It drops points mainly in
the project view stakes. It doesn't have a fully interactive story or task
board and the burndown charts were not the best. It is considerably cheaper
than the other two in this tier though and handles story, task and testing
management well.
SilverCatalyst and Scrumninja are similar
concepts and, that they scored so similarly is not surprising. They don't do
anywhere near as much as the upper tier tools in terms of allowing multiple
levels of project, releases, iterations, epics, stories, tasks, tests etc. but they
are no where near as complicated either. They do the core items very
effectively and intuitively with a high focus on a familiar card based story/task
board view of the project.
AgileBuddy, ProjectCards and Agilo probably make up the next grouping and all focus on the
backlog management areas of the process. They don't provide much, if anything, in
the way of story and task boards or burndown charts.
Finally, sitting sort of on
its own is XPlanner. This is an open
source project and offers much already and promises much more. Currently as
with the three in the previous group it's focused on the core backlog and task
management areas. Those things that can be considered as improved interfaces
such as task boards, burndowns are not there yet. It's one to keep an eye on
though due to its price and its open source nature makes it potentially integratable
with other tools.
So to our choice and the one we deemed right for our project and our team.
SilverCatalyst. It does what we need and it does it efficiently with a highly
intuitive interface and at the individual task level it stacks up well against
the highest scoring Version One as can be seen below.
It also comes as an on-site version in addition to the hosted offering that was tested which promises integration with thirdparty tools allowing enhanced bug tracking, IDE integration etc. We may or may not go for this option as the hosted solution ticks a very big box for us with regards remote working but, if we do I'll certainly blog on the ease of integration, or otherwise.