What's the best agile project management tool?

December 1, 2009 1:24 PM

What's your favorite agile project management tool?

I'm looking for something that allows tracking of backlog, user tasks, developer time for tasks, and provides reporting for sprints, projects, and user stories on a daily, weekly, and sprint-level basis.

I've looked at AgileBuddy, which is pretty great, but the reporting isn't very good. I need to be able to see who did what 6 weeks ago, and I need to be able to do it without referring to the "activity view", which shows every action by every team member.

Is there another tool out there that I should be looking at?

Oh, and it needs to be web-based.

posted by bshort to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

We use LiquidPlanner and have had some good success with it, though it has a bit of an intimidating learning curve at the very beginning. They have some great resources for jumping in though and it provides everything you're asking for.
posted by disillusioned at 1:27 PM on December 1, 2009

Any price range here?

Rally is pretty good

Thoughtworks has Mingle

Honestly I have to admit though I have yet to find an agile tool that I'm really excited about.
posted by bitdamaged at 1:36 PM on December 1, 2009

VersionOne is pretty nice and (I think, still) offers a free year of their 'lightweight' platform.

Echoing bitdamaged: none of the tools out there are really that amazing -- I'd call myself a hippy-Scrum practitioner (i.e. just in it for the standups and sprints, fuck the charts and graphs and numbers) though, so YMMV.
posted by wrok at 1:53 PM on December 1, 2009

We've got ScrumWorks, but it's unexciting. Does what you ask though.
posted by mjg123 at 2:41 PM on December 1, 2009

i'm a fan of Pivotal's Tracker, it's free and simple -- don't remember if it has the particular chart you're looking for.
http://www.pivotaltracker.com/

Rally has tons of graphs, but I can't say I enjoy its UI.
posted by maulik at 2:43 PM on December 1, 2009

I've used Rally, which has what you need, but they seriously need to do some usability work to improve the experience of using their interface.
posted by matildaben at 3:26 PM on December 1, 2009

We use ScrumWorks at work, and it's just fine. We tried Agilo for a sprint, but it was a pain in the ass to configure and its setup was counterintuitive to what agile is supposed to be. (Create milestones and then tasks under them? Strange.)

I've heard of some success with Basecamp, and it looks like it can be modified to work with agile projects.
posted by gchucky at 3:53 PM on December 1, 2009

You could also try Serena Agile on Demand. It is a relatively new product and you can sign up for 5 free licenses.

Just as a disclaimer, I work for Serena and Agile on Demand was built by my team :-). But we use it everyday and are continuing to make it better.
posted by wmatveyenko at 8:10 AM on December 2, 2009

I like Target Process It's got the added benefit of being highly configurable to match your company's 'actual' workflow, as nobody seems to truly follow real scrum/agile methods. Though it's great for Agile right 'out of the box'.
posted by soplerfo at 12:01 PM on December 3, 2009