Agile project tools for personal/open source projects

Been briefly assessing some online free tools for agile task planning for a few personal FOSS projects.

A physical task board is perhaps the suggestion from the agile purists, however not useful for me (nor my family :)).

At work I often have to use the awful Quality Center. It is good for planning functional testing, but not much else. The user interface is painful, and only works on windows with IE.

But most project I have been on eventually drop it for the more developer friendly Jira by Atlassian. Its UI gets cleaner and cleaner. And is great for Scrum projects since the intergration of GreenHopper. It is however very feature rich which is good and bad, and sometimes quite slow. I recommend Jira for distributed larger organisations. It is however an overkill for my needs.

I have been using Pivotal Tracker for some of my projects for a few years. It is a great tool. For scrum projects it is the tool I would recommend the most. They recently started charging but it is still free for public projects. It is however very iteration/scrum centric and as such not useful for my more Kanbanish time irrelevant requirements.

So I started to look at more tools (and revisit some previous ones).
My requirements are:

1. Free, as in beer or near enough. $9/month and similar is too much for personal projects unless heavily used.


2. Agile task board simulation


3. Not time iteration based


4. Simple functional UI, but not ugly


5. Icebox feature for storing tasks/ideas not yet ready for the backlog


6. Pivotal like Feature, Chore and Bug classification


7. Limiting WIP


8. Kanban queues


9. Simple T-shirt or fibonacci estimates

Not all requirements have to be met.

Here are my initial impressions:

Pivotal Tracker

Time iterative centric.
Looks nice. Clean interface.
No WIP limit.
No kanban queue.
Got Icebox feature
Got Feature-chore-bug classification.
Fibonacci estimates.
Unlimited free public projects.

AgileZen

Kanban style flow.
Looks nice. Clean interface.
Columns can be renamed.
Got WIP limit.
No icebox. Can rename backlog icebox and rename another column backlog.
No estimates
Only 1 project on the free price plan.
FOSS projects can apply for free usage.

Kanbanery

Kanban style flow.
Looks nice. Clean interface.
Columns can be renamed.
Got WIP limit.
Got Icebox feature
Got Feature-chore-bug classification.
T-shirt estimates.
Only 1 project on the free price plan.
No FOSS free plan.

Kanbanpad

Kanban style flow.
Clean interface.
Little confusing UI.
Got Kanban queues.
Got WIP limit.
Got Icebox (the "backlog").
No estimates.
Unlimited projects.
All plans are free.
Permissions are strange. No member can edit and public can only view. Either member view and edit with no public access, or public(anonymous) can view and edit!!

Leankit

Kanban style flow.
Seems very feature rich. Perhaps too many features.
UI a little cluttered.
Tasks seems too much like post-it notes.
Only 1 project on the free price plan.
No FOSS free plan.

ScrumDO

Scrum focused.
Looks nice.
Feature rich.
UI a little confusing.
No Icebox.
No WIP limit.
No kanban queue.
Fibonacci and t-shirt estimates.
10 project on the free price plan.
No FOSS free plan.

Flow

Kanban style flow.
Tasks seems too much like post-it notes.
No Icebox.
Got WIP limit.
Only 1 project on the free price plan.
FOSS projects can apply for free usage.


I may update this in the future when I get more impressions of the ones I use and if I find other tools.


My recommendations depends, but currently they are:

• For large commercial projects Jira offer features and reports. And can be installed inside your firewall.


• For Scrum projects Pivotal Tracker offers the most complete package.


• For Kanban projects, the it depends on your own requirements and taste, but my current favourites are Kanbanery and AgileZen. Kanbanpad's no restrictions on number of projects is also tempting

Remove deadlines, increase productivity

In a recent project the tasks were always delegated and pointless deadlines set on everything. This seems so counter productive and ineffective compared to my past 5 years of agile based projects (inc maintenance).

As for task delegation I will need to evangelise more about the benefits of self organising and ownership through bottom up delegation, WIPs, velocity projection, prioritisation benefits etc.

My current beef is about noisy deadlines. Deadlines are for product owner / project managers. The team should never need to deal with deadlines. Especially when not meeting them has no consequence, so why have them at all? The team deals with prioritised tasks and if needed time boxed tasks. The tasks are divided up so that they are small enough so that a slip of 300% from estimation has no really impact as you are only talking about hours or days. However if the project velocity overt time does not seem to meet external deadlines then the scope of the backlog need to change, not to push developers/testers harder.

In agile teams they should not confuse deadlines for an estimation of how much work is left. If your current task may seem like another 2 days worth of work, do not set a deadline in two days. You may have interfering meetings or get stuck on a small issue that extend that tasks into next week. (Or hit an coding-happy-zone or eureka moment and finish in a few hours). Setting a deadline do not make you finish earlier and pushing developers/testers harder does not improve code quality. A task based deadline is only noise and stress.

Product owners can plan, communicate, etc with dates to customers, company boards or steering groups etc but they should be soft, movable dates and based on current project velocity, and no minor deadlines. If the velocity slows down, then reduce the scope of the backlog, or move the dates. Do not put pressure on the team with more micromanaged deadlines. It will only be noise and slow down development. The team does not really need to know specific dates apart perhaps from general roadmap (lavalamp?)for big releases.

True, some dates can not be moved, such as Christmas promotions, larger entities' deadlines etc, but with enough balls you would be surprised how many customer, senior management deadlines can be moved with good communication, even completely removed. Good project transparency and communication, and thus project velocity visibility is usually a much bigger relation and delivery benefit.

I agree that some pressure of delivery should exist but no cutthroat stress inducing deadlines. An agile process of pride in delivering tasks may quickly vanquish need for deadlines.

• agile-commentary.blogspot.com/2009/06/are-deadlines-important.html


• developers.slashdot.org/story/06/09/28/1242257/Good-Agile-mdash-Development-Without-Deadlines


• steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html


• www.slideshare.net/jurgenappelo/agile-management-authority-delegation


• www.noop.nl/2009/10/why-we-delegate-the-darkness-principle.html


• www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1675546&seqNum=6


• blog.adsdevshop.com/2010/02/09/task-delegation-has-no-place-in-agile/


• stackoverflow.com/questions/63100/scrum-process-management-tips-pitfalls-ideas