Agile issue and feature tracker software [closed]

Question

I'm looking for the "best" agile-friendly feature and defect tracking software. Currently, we are using fogbugz, but this is not terribly useful for teams following an agile methodology as far as I can tell. There are better tools for this, such as Greenhopper for JIRA. I've used JIRA before, but I'm wondering if there are any other tools that are better.

Intermarriage

did you try red cards on your taskboard? as long as you don't have distributed teams, this might serve you very well! – Dislocation

I assume you are talking about tangible notecards on a physical board. With our environment, this will not work. I'm not a big fan of notecards or any tangible status tracking. I think there are many, many disadvantages to this approach. – Intermarriage

I agree with @phoet. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. – Pander

@userXYZ i think that there are also many, many disadvantages to the tooling-approach, but it sounds like that you are not interested in such a discussion, so i would recommend putting the "red bug cards" into pivatal-tracker alongside of your normal "task". – Dislocation

I'm sorry, but notecards are silly (if that is what we are talking about here). It is so much easier/convenient and realistic to use modern technology for this sort of thing. With software, editing stories, tasks, and defects are much easier, especially with a team that is not setup in a bullpen environment and/or teams that have (even occasional) remote members. Maintaining history (from past sprints) and alerting others to changes in near-real time is also not really possible with notecards or any other tangible status devices. Cards may be obscured or hard to find in large projects. – Intermarriage

@user486979 - this is your opinion. As a developer who was involved in many agile projects for the last 10 years, having tried multiple solutions for issues / bugs management, I can say from my experience: nothing beats physical cards on a wall (although some managements compliance guidelines require you to back them up with tracking systems). The only thing that, to me, advocates a software over physical cards is distributed team and the impossibility to be actually near the board. For every other scenario, my choice is to stick with cards: invaluable during stand-ups. – Disgruntle

This question has been asked already on Programmers: programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/8808/… – Pander

@Disgruntle Having worked both with physical cards and good tracking systems, I really have no idea why some people like cards. I'll take something like Pivotal Tracker over cards any day. – Gabler

Answer 1

I'll relate my experience, hoping it will be helpful.

We started piloting Scrum using cards on a wall. We figured we would switch to a tool once we started doing it for real. We set up our defect tracker (Redmine) with User Story and Tasks, and have a way to create a burndown in each project. What we found, however, is that you don't really get the transparency of a physical information radiator. People walk by the card wall and can see the team progress. Very few will check the web site as often as they inspect the card wall. So currently, we do the card wall for the current Sprint and track the Sprint in Redmine, which gives us historical information.

As we scaled up to more teams than we have wall space for, we realized we're going to need a tool that can work like a card wall and be a 'real' agile tracker. So we looked at several tools, and our short list included Version One, Rally, and Mingle. Either of these products might be best for you, but ultimately we chose Mingle for various reasons.

The one thing I worry about is the loss of the card walls. It's hard to explain the transformative value that these public information radiators have had. The teams get lots of visibility from the Product Owners as well as management and other stakeholders. I worry that the visibility will be lost if we switch to using solely the tool. I may have to build dashboards that go up on wall-mounted monitors, acting as a high-tech version of the card walls. One thing we did do was procure some touchscreen whiteboards that will allow teams in standups to move virtual cards in a familiar way, using the tool's drag-and-drop card wall interface. I'm hoping this will allow us to retain the team communication and interaction benefits we've seen when gathered around a card wall.

Anyway, good luck with your quest!

Pander

I completely relate to your experience. I've been in many projects, some using physical board for task tracking and daily management, some using online tool, and the difference in term of global visibility (and how everyone feel like they know about the "big picture") is amazing. Very hard to explain to someone who has not tried both approaches though. – Disgruntle

And another thing that you'll loose if you switch to an online tool is the ability to easily, manually, move the cards around (e.g. during stand-ups). This doesn't look much and is very often understated, but this is a big part of what agile should be: ease of use, not complicating your development life with unneeded contingencies. – Disgruntle

Thanks, Mark, for the response. Version One looks very attractive. I can also recommend YouTrack (jetbrains.com/youtrack). It's quite similar to Version One. @Guillaume, I totally disagree with you, because all modern Agile web-boards allow easily move the cards around – Hunsinger

Answer 2

We are using PivotalTracker (http://pivotaltracker.com) in our projects. It is a lightweight and easy to use tool. It works in the cloud, so creating an account and setting up a project is a matter of minutes. User story and bug entering is quite easy. The tool supports a standard workflow of tasks consisting of Not Started, Started, Finished, Delivered, Accepted and Rejected states.

I haven't tried fogbugz yet but I used JIRA, Greenhopper and VersionOne before PivotalTracker. The downside of all these tools against PivotalTracker is that using them brings you too much overhead. You have to setup and maintain them. You have to configure them. And because they are harder to use, they require more time for daily usage. I have seen that developers hesitate to use these tools because they create too much friction. IMO PivotalTracker is the best tool in this respect.

The downside of PivotalTracker is that it gives only a few configuration options. It doesn't allow you to customize workflows. It doesn't have much user authorization options. But in our case it suits very good to our needs.

Blabbermouth

I love Pivotal Tracker. I wish they had managed to keep it free, though. – Gabler

Update: as of January 2015, the free plans became much more generous. Yay! – Gabler

Answer 3

This might be a non-answer to some extent, but I hope it will still be informative and add value.

I've been on multiple teams using various tools including physical boards and Greenhopper. Other agile teams in my department have used and evaluated various other options. If you are talking about finding the most efficient way to manage the team within a sprint (as opposed to release planning, backlog grooming, etc) I've come to the following conclusion: Nothing is going to be a great fit unless you wrote the tool yourself or use a speadsheet. Yes, a spreadsheet. It's the most flexible option I've come across. We use a fancy one with burndown charts and such, but it works great.

Any tool you find now which may be a perfect fit will eventually end up not doing something you want. Here is an example from my own recent experience:

We were working to bring down the length of time it takes to report status during out daily scrum meeting. The challenge was that developers have a tendency to go into a detailed explanation of issues they've encountered while working on a task. We try to postpone those discussions until after the scrum meeting. It was hard to do until we started simply highlighting any items in the spreadsheet we need to discuss further. This let us move on with the meeting but not lose track of issues that need to be discussed. It was effortless to introduce this into our process precisely because we were using a flexible tool like a spreadsheet. The tool didn't stand in the way of improving our process.

As for defect tacking, most of the teams in my department use JIRA.

Gouveia

Downvoting. Spreadsheets don't work well as good issue trackers. (JIRA, even with Greenhopper, is not a good issue tracker.) – Gabler

I'm just sharing our experience and what conclusions we came to. I don't see anything wrong with adding another perspective. – Gouveia

And what software have you tried, other than Greenhopper? – Gabler