A completely free agile software process tool [closed]

Question

I know slightly close questions have been asked before but this question is a bit different.

We are a start-up company with a very limited budget and we are looking for a completely free Agile software development process tool without any limitation on the number of users. We don't want to have a limitation for the number of users because there could be a lot of people who would do small tasks for us and if they pass the number of user limit all of a sudden we'll have to pay a lot of money for the tool monthly.

It would be very useful if it could support:

• Kanban board
• Task hierarchy (so that you can define cards within cards)
• Hosting the tool online (not download)
• Commenting system
• Different roles
• Swimlanes

I have checked a lot of those tools here:

http://agilescout.com/best-agile-scrum-tools/

but I didn't find any that is absolutely free for unlimited users. Some of them also don't have a Kanban board. I checked Agilefant but its online version is going to be paid from 2014. I also checked Stackoverflow for this but none of the questions were targeting "completely free tools".

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

Stripe

If I wanted a completely free, flexible way of doing Kanban I'd implement it with a google spreadsheet, with a tab for each "area". Or if my team were all in one place I'd use a physical board and budget for a couple of packs of posit notes – Heteropterous

I would not consider this question as completely off-topic. It's different from the common please-recommend-me-a-tool-for-maintaining-the-whole-Universe requests. The OP very concretely defines his needs and as you may see 9 users voted +1 so far. I am exactly in the same need and I have found the question as extremely helpful. Furthermore, the accepted (and the most voted-for) answer contains useful hints how to work around some requirements. – Franconia

@HonzaZidek - completely agree. There seems to be a culture now in SO that any question that has the slightest whiff of breaking the "off-topic" rule is shutdown, regardless of the quality of the question. I do wish the "close-police" would exercise a bit of common sense and/or pragmatism. Going to the recommendation site results in a tumbleweed so this is really your only choice in Stack-Exchange...Also, it served no purpose since the question is alive and kicking and still getting votes : ) – Higgs

Not complete, but close: GitHub itself since Sept. 2016: stackoverflow.com/a/39525270/6309 – Reconstructive

@Reconstructive Good to know! – Stripe

visualstudioonline.com is free for 5 basic users and unlimited stakeholders. It includes a Scrum process and is actually very useful. I've just been looking at the suitability of Trello for Scrum. While I use Trello extensively for other things, it would be difficult to implement an effective Scrum process using Trello, even with some of the plugins available. – Holdup

For those who land on this page by searching 'free scrum tool' -> use Taiga. See taiga.io its awesome. It is a free scrum tool which works great. You can also use kanban and it has an issue tracker. – Siliculose

I like this one ... scrumblr.ca – Swagger

Answer 1

Trello.com Trello is free for unlimited users. Period.

You almost definitely don't need "Sub-cards". Use the checklists instead, or if you REALLY need sub-cards, don't have a parent sub-card. Just name the tickets something like "Epic - Story A" or "Story - task Z" or whatever.

Another idea is to create two boards (did I mention you can have unlimited boards for free too?). One for your epics and one for your stories. Call one your product management board and the other your sprint board, or whatever you like.

I'm not sure what you need different roles for - but, people aren't crazy - they know their job. As a startup if you already have problems getting people to not do crazy things (Where you need to restrict their permissions) you have much much bigger issues.

The point is that you need a SMALL tool to help you track stuff. Not a super rigid tool that makes you work in a super specific way. As a new (I assume?) startup, you should let your process grow into a tool. Don't beef up your process to fit a tool.

Theola

Your suggestions were pretty useful. Actually Trello is the best one I have found so far too but it has two big problems: 1) it doesn't have swimlanes which is really necessary for us since we are using feature-driven development (FDD) as a software process and each lane should represent one feature. 2) it doesn't give any statistical analysis which is also important for us to see how things are going. Any suggestions in this regard will also be appreciated. – Stripe

I googled a little bit - couldn't find anything about FDD that says it requires swimlanes. But, you could use stickers I guess - blog.trello.com/…. As far as your analytics go, you're gonna have to roll your own - trello.com/docs. To be honest, Unless you have 15+ developers on this team, this seems like process overkill. A manager of mine once said "Don't make the process a deliverable". – Theola

There are tools for Trello (like Scrum for Trello, Burndown for Trello) that can add on estimates and burndown reports). Additionally, you can use the 'labels' feature of Trello to flag cards as being part of different 'features'. Alternatively, you could use different boards for different swim lanes, if the teams are completely independent. I have used Trello several times for projects, and it works as a free tool. – Boarfish

I would recommend to use : github.com/devtyr/trello-burndown, you may also try : scrumfortrello.com and burndownfortrello.com – Steffin

@Mark Note to the the author of the question (and to the reviewers that approved the edit): you are not supposed to edit an answer to add a comment. That is what... comments are for. – Cicelycicenia

UPDATE: in Trello you can give different permissions to different people. Furthermore, there are some Google Chrome extensions that gives additional features to Trello like statistical analysis. – Stripe

Trello is no longer free for organizations, and it does not know about scrum. It's just a list manager. No date based functions – Hereon

Trello remains free for any number of users and any number of boards. To me, that's free. The advanced features that cost money are hardly essential, so I believe this answer is still accurate. – Theola

Answer 2

Back in 2010 we had the same problem and i successfully employed GoogleDocs with our small Agile Development team (8 Devs in 3 Countries).

GoogleDrawing will serve in the exact same way as a physical Scrum board would, with all the upsides of full flexibilty and also the downsides of zero automation but with the big additional upside of being virtual and accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.

It also was used for the retrospective at the end of each Sprint

GoogleSpreadsheet was used for a concise list of all the tickets from our bug tracking system (Redmine, manually transfered) and also for the (manually updated, albeit with formulas to calculate the progress) burndown chart.

The combination of these different elements is actually quite powerful, as you have the full flexibility over the content and its representation and can have your team communicate via VoIP while all are looking at the same documents and can modify them in real-time.

Here an example of the docs used in a sprint (all sensitive data removed):

• Scrum board Example (GoogleDrawing)
• Retrospective Example (GoogleDrawing)
• Burndown Chart Example (GoogleSheet, formulas to automate calculation)
• Ticket list from Bugtracker (GoogleSheet)

As mentioned before, the only downside is the fact that you have to invest some time to maintain and prepare the data for each sprint, but for us that was hugely outweighed by the flexibility and accessibility that the Team of GoogleDocs + VoIP gave us.

Setsukosett

Answer 3

You can check out https://kanbanflow.com It's free for now because it's in beta and they say there is no time limit. It behaves very similar to AgileZen

I second the google doc, or you could use an online collaborative board that multiple people can edit.

Or you can host a more robust excel doc in skydrive from MS. I haven't tried that yet.

Mura.ly is another one that I am playing with currently. It has unlimited collaborators, though I think you would probably have to invite them everytime?? with a free account.

Hope that helps!

Soothfast

I tried Trello and Kanbanflow, and Kanbanflow is far superior. It is much more intuitive. Try to delete something in Trello, you can't. You can configure the board however you like. The default is identical to Scrum (To do, In Progress, Done). You can easily invite users. It is using a freemium model. Give it a try. I'm not associated with them at all and was just frustrated with Trello. – Emboss

Don't know how Trello behaved back in '14, but now you surely can delete everything you want. Delete a list: click on it, select Archive This List. Delete a card: click on Archive, then it can also be deleted. Other things on cards all have their own Delete parts, too. – Bill

Answer 4

Try http://www.icescrum.org . It is free to use. And it has lot of cool features. Perfect for scrum teams.

Levison

I found this tool difficult to configure in a Tomcat7 container on Win7Pro. In fact, I couldn't get it so start (the web part anyway). – Methadone

Disclamer: I'm from iceScrum team. You can try online without install without a free cloud account on icescrum.com – Wera

Answer 5

EDIT: Kanbanize is a commercial product and offers a 30 day free trial.

Disclosing: I am a co-founder of http://kanbanize.com/

Mark, I understand your desire to find the perfect application with all these features inside, but I really doubt that you will get it for free. There's a bunch of super cool apps (including Kanbanize) out there, but none of them is completely free.

Be careful what you call a Kanban board and what not, though. Trello is definitely NOT a kanban system (no WIP limits, no analytics, etc.). It is a great visual management system, but not a Kanban one.

Finally, to answer your question, tools that deserve attention in my opinion are: Kanbanize (of course), LeanKit, KanbanTool, Kanbanery and probably a few others. My personal bias is that LeanKit is the most advanced to date followed by Kanbanize and KanbanTool.

I hope that helps.

Autotomize

Kanbanize does not look bad, but the lack of task hierarchy in the free version and general lack of user stories and/or features makes it unusable. The subtasks which cannot be estimated by storypoints are not usable, either. – Franconia

not free any longer :( – Araucaria

Answer 6

One possibility would be to use a Google Drawing, part of Google Drive, if you want a more visual and easy-to-edit option. You can create the cards by grouping a color-filled rectangle and one or more text fields together. Being a sufficiently free-form online vector drawing program, it doesn't really limit your possibilities like if you use a more dedicated solution.

The only real downsides are that you have to first create the building blocks from the beginning, and don't get numerical statistics like with a more structured tool.

Photoflood

This technique was recommended in the book Lean from the Trenches. I like the idea of this approach. No limits of how a certain software package works, much like a physical board. – Mattock

Answer 7

Although, I'm a big fan of Kanban Tool service (it has everything you need except free of charge) and therefore it's difficult for me to stay objective, I think that should go for Trello or Kanban Flow. Both are free and both provide basic features that are essential for agile process managers and their teams.

Elanorelapid

Kanban tool is only free for 2 users and up to 2 boards and this thread is looking for a free kanban tool without any limitation on the number of users. If having limitation was not an issue, a lot of kanban tools have free offers with some limitations. – Stripe