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My First Agile Project Part 9: Choosing A New Tool - VersionOne

October 27, 2008 by mattgrommes

Picture courtesy of VersionOne and me

In my previous post, I talked about my team's experience using ScrumWorks as our Scrum backlog management for the first year or so of our project. After our vendor's license for ScrumWorks ran out, we thought we were close to the end of our project so we stopped using any tool for tracking tasks beyond our bug repository. As I'll talk about in this post, a combination of factors led us to start looking for a new backlog / taskboard tool and the one we've settled on is VersionOne. Read on for more details about why we chose VersionOne and how we plan on using it, even once we've moved on our first agile project.

First, a word about Part 8 of this series, where I outlined the things my team and I didn't like about ScrumWorks. I didn't intend that article to be a review of ScrumWorks at all but more of a look at how we used it and why we didn't like it at the time. It expanded and was seen by some as too harsh on ScrumWorks, especially since I was talking about an older version. It appears that ScrumWorks has done some good updates and fixed a lot of the issues we didn't like about it. But some of the problems are philosophical and I'll get to those in a bit. But if you're looking for a Scrum tool, make sure you do your own evaluation and don't take my word for it. Every team is different.

Also, just so there's no misunderstanding; neither I or Agilesoftwaredevelopment.com have any connection to any tool I mention here beyond using them.

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My First Agile Project Part 8: 9 Things We Disliked (and Liked) about ScrumWorks

October 20, 2008 by mattgrommes

Picture courtesy of Danube and me

This installment of My First Agile Project is going to be a little different than the previous ones (Table of Contents for the series available at the end of the post). Today I'm going to tackle the topic of tools. During the first year or so of our project we used ScrumWorks by Danube. It was brought to us by our vendor along with the Scrum methodology. After our license ran out we didn't like ScrumWorks enough to get our own license or even go with the free version, which I'll go into more detail about below.

For our last couple of sprints, we've been making due with a whiteboard and evaluating other tools. The one I like the best and we'll probably be going with is VersionOne, which I'll be talking about in more detail next week. Honestly VersionOne makes ScrumWorks look old-fashioned and barely functional. I had a list of things I didn't like about ScrumWorks and one of the first things I noticed during my initial demo was that VersionOne didn't do any of those things, obviously a big selling point. This week's post is that list of pros and cons about ScrumWorks.

Choosing a tool can be very important in a lot of software development and choosing where to put your backlog and tasks is extra important to Scrum. Since the whiteboard/corkboard + stickies/index card approach is basically free, you want to choose a tool that gives you some extra benefit. Read on for my team's pros and cons about ScrumWorks and hopefully it'll provide some insight on this important decision.

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