Agile development; on-line free tools! [closed]

Question

We have been looking to implement Agile methodology within our geographically distributed development team, so i need suggestions on any free on-line application that you have used and find useful.

Right now we are using paper cards and wall to manage this :), but we want to shift to an on-line version preferably free.

I have used TargetProcess at my previous job!

My Core requirements are:

• Business Analyst can add user stories
• We can assign, prioritize different user stories to developers.
• QA team can add test cases around different user stories.
• Project Manager can track the time of all the resources and can pull reports for upper management

Polysaccharide

Are you all on the same companies network or are you only connecting to each other through the internet? There are some good tools but exposing them publicly would be tougher. – Appendicectomy

We are on the same company network! – Polysaccharide

@BT - If you are on the same network then I would recommend TeamCity. I would have put it in an answer but @amelvin beat me too it! – Appendicectomy

I have a look at the TeamCity, but it didn't look like an Agile tool, it sore of an integrated build management tool, let me know if i'm missing something. – Polysaccharide

TeamCity is closely linked in with developing using SVN. On the site where I'm currently working it builds and deploys applications within seconds of a developer committing changes to SVN - generating iterative builds (that can be rolled back to an SVN version) which I reckon makes it agile. – Eolic

SO is stubbornly against recommendation questions. You may have better luck on SoftwarRecs. – Sipper

Answer 1

I've been using Pivotal Tracker which is a free agile project management tool and covers the following agile concepts:

• Velocity tracking and emergent iterations
• Story-based iterative planning
• Real-time collaboration

Would certainly recommend you try this before paying for an alternative.

Also, as mentioned, Basecamp is a great tool for maintaining documentation, to-do lists and the rest. There is a barely promoted free option for single project use that you will find on the signup page below the Max and Premium options.

Possibly not an agile tool as such (depends on your definition) but the free Team City continuous integration and build server is the kind of software that you don't believe you could live without once you've used it. Basically a commit to SVN by any developer triggers a build to your staging server about 30 seconds later meaning the latest build is very agile!

Eolic

@amelvin: Thanks, i have created an account using Pivotal Tracker, i'll be exploring it for couple of days, apparently it's a good starting point for me. – Polysaccharide

Pivotal Tracker is an excellent tool - very easy to get into, hope it works for you. – Eolic

Pivotal tracker is still excellent but sadly not free anymore – Roarke

Pivotal Tracker is free for the next six months, after which its only free for a limited number of projects and collaborators. – Eolic

Thanks a lot for suggeting Pivotal Tracker, it's great! It's free for 5 private projects (I created 7 for test and they were creted... IDK if I'm in evaluation or something) and with no colaborators. I've been using Conqu for personal GTD task management and it's great, but it doesn't work for Software Engineering tasks, which Pivotal Tracker does! – Waldowaldon

Pivotal Tracker is now only free for 60 days. – Grommet

Answer 2

Timetracking: slimtimer.com. This is one of the best time trackers I've seen (and I've seen many)

Mercurial code hosting: list available here. I've only used the service provided by sourceforge.net and was satisfied with it.

Web conferencing, desktop and whiteboard sharing: Dimdim. I haven't had much luck with it, but I believe it might perform much better on a Windows machine.

All sorts of version control, wiki, RSS feeds: sourceforge.net. It's only for FOSS projects, though, but it really ofers a lot of services.

Other than that, basecamp should fit right in an agile process (although I haven't used it much) with a reasonable price ($50/month...)

Pringle

Indeed. Feel free to add an alternative. – Pringle

Answer 3

Try using http://www.icescrum.org/en/. This is open source tool and free platform for Agile developments. You can read its feature on Features tab on website. Also, Visit http://www.openlogic.com/wazi/bid/188152/Comparing-Open-Source-Agile-Project-Management-Tools. This article compares the most compelling open source options.

Weiner

Answer 4

At work we use a product called Skinnyboard. It has a ton of great features, like:

• Support for Sprints and Product Backlogs
• Sprint tracking via stories/tasks
• Individual task history
• Sprint/Product Backlog burndown, to see projected finish dates, etc.

It's free to try, which gives you (I believe) one board. After that you have to pay though, but it's a great product and definitely worth it.

It's simple, visually appealing, and only has what you need. In my opinion, it's like the Basecamp of SCRUM tools.

Ziguard

Answer 5

They say it better than I ever could,

AgileFant is an open source tool for managing agile software development activities, such as: projects, products, releases, iterations and backlogs. It brings together the perspectives of long-term product and release planning and project portfolio management.

Another one that's recently sparked some interest and seems potentially useful (I'm in beta, easy to get in afaik) is Flowdock which is basically a mish-mash of email alerts, RSS feeds, ticketing systems and plain ol' realtime chat with status messages et al. Think of it as Google Wave that doesn't suck and check out the intro video from the front page.

Casefy

Answer 6

Try out Flying Donut. It is a new online product inspired by scrum. You may host public or private projects.

Disclaimer: I have been using it for many months, since I helped building it, and I love it.

Kershaw