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I are working in a small development team of 4 people. We are trying develop "Agile style" - story points, small tasks, etc... Unfortunately, we are currently managing our tasks in a (shared) excel table.

We looked at some available tools (Mingle, TFS, Scrum for Team System), but all of these looked like they would be too much overhead and take the fun out of working.

What are you Agile lovers using for tracking your tasks over long period of time?

Update The current top answer is not really an answer to what I intended to ask - I need some tool to help me find out, over the long run, which features & tasks I estimated correctly, and where did I go horribly wrong. I see how a whiteboard/all of post-its help with managing the current or previous iterations, but I don't see myself searching for a post-it from 2 months ago.

ripper234
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22 Answers22

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Update Response: It doesn't seem imprortant to track WHAT was underestimated as much as WHY it was underestimated. This is something addressed at the iteration retrospective. If there are impediments, they should be addressed early and resolved. If you're looking to address something more specific than just seeing a task in the past that was undersetimated, you should ask about that.

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Tom Carr
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  • How does that help you track progress? We want to track our estimates over time, so we need software... – ripper234 Sep 18 '08 at 18:17
  • Do you really need software? I think you just need the underlying knowledge the software uses to perform its management tasks. "How does long division help me divide 9 by 3? I need a calculator!" – Loren Segal Sep 18 '08 at 21:59
  • ...not that I'm saying software wouldn't help automate some boring calculations, but "how do index cards help?" is the wrong question. – Loren Segal Sep 18 '08 at 22:03
  • THe cards at the far right are the piles from completed iterations. At the end of an iteration we take all the cards from the completed stage and move them over there. That tracks progress over time. – Tom Carr Sep 18 '08 at 22:28
  • Sorry for my phrasing, but what I really meant is that I want to track features & tasks for the long run. I want to be able to look at tasks from two months ago and say "Hmm, I really thought this would take 2 hours, it actually took 16". – ripper234 Sep 19 '08 at 09:20
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A whiteboard, index cards and sharpies.

Greg
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  • Cards, a board and sharpies are the best way to do it. Once planning software gets involved it becomes the centre of attention. Developers focus on how to make the planning software better - rather than creating what the customer paid for. – Dafydd Rees Dec 04 '09 at 00:44
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Just use Trac. It has everything you need for a small project. You could use the ticketing system to distribute the tasks (in Agile you should think in terms of stories and not individual tasks anyway) but if it's not enough you could get extra plugins for time management etc.

Ilya Kochetov
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  • If using Trac, I'd recommend the Agilo plugin, which is Scrum plugin for Trac available at http://www.agile42.com/cms/pages/agilo/ – Matthew Rankin Jan 05 '10 at 03:14
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We're using Xplanner right now, with pretty good results.

Aeon
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"We looked at some available tools (Mingle, TFS, Scrum for Team System), but all of these looked like they would be too much overhead and take the fun out of working."

I can only suggest you give Mingle a real trial, it's amazing. My developers love it and so do I.

There is a small learning curve but it's so flexible, I'd suggest looking at the Hybrid sample project and the built-in reports to get over any reservations you may have.

Our project would be dead in the water if it wasn't for Mingle, I have a disability but can still modify 300+ cards in a day if required. Plus it's free for a year for 5 users or less!

Post-its cannot possibly facilitate the communication and teamwork that this software provides out of the box, and if you don't like the way it works you can keep tweaking it till it suits your team.

Hardware - I'd suggest a quad core & 8GB for decent performance.

Disclosure: I have no association with Thoughtworks, other than loving their s/ware.

Andykiteman
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Write them out on labels and stick them up on a board - it works :) Also Scrum really does not give you overhead - it works pretty well and is very satisfying for all team members imho :)

Per Hornshøj-Schierbeck
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Here we use Trac for one project and @Task for another.

At another company, we used Excel sheets with each person's tasks, printed and pinned to the wall.

In general, most forms of actually planning, documenting, and tracking tasks is going to take the fun out of working... But it is completely necessary to stay sane.

jdmichal
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I really like JIRA and the GreenHopper plugin looks to add some nice features.

RichH
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I like dotProject for actual task tracking. You can easily attack the database to get your on statistical data out of it if needen.

For the planning proces I use Microsoft Project mainly because I'm used to it. I also used the open source tool OpenProj.

Changing tasks in dotProject is painful, so I usually enter them only about 4 to 6 weeks in advance.

FogBuz seems to be a great tool, I just never had the time to try it out and am realla a late adopter of such tools.

Oli
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Index cards work great, but if you need it online, I'd try Unfuddle. You can use it for small groups for free, and it's lightweight enough that you can adjust it to your group's needs pretty easily.

I use it at work, and we keep all stories in its "notebooks" (read: wikis) and tasks in its tasking system. It has built in milestones and releases, and its Subversion and Git integration are pretty great: we can log comments on and resolve tasks with version control messages.

Clinton Dreisbach
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We're using ScrumWorks for about 30 people. They have a free edition.

http://danube.com/scrumworks

DustinB
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I like Pivotal Tracker. It's a story-based project planning tool that allows teams to collaborate in real-time

Alejandro Bologna
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Rally is a really nice tool that is focused around Agile development.

RichH
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We are a team spread across multiple locations. The tool I've found useful has been a wiki built over Twiki.

Benefits:

  1. Wiki-like environment so collaboration is easy.
  2. Plugins available to add 'applications' such as minutes of meetings, Bulletin Boards,
  3. Discussion Forums.
  4. Secure.
Vivek Kodira
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I the agile teams I work with, we dont manage task over a long period of time. Instead, we manage a "backlog" of features to be added to the product. We sometime also call those "user stories". This backlog is a kind of slicing of the product in a list of incremental features to be delivered. We manage this backlog in Excel, with very few columns such as description, complexity evaluation and done/not done, iteration, and that's it.

During the iteration, the tasks are managed in a postit wall as presented in one of the answers. In case a task last more than one iteration, we manage to fragment it, ensuring features/user stories are delivered at each iteration.

An example of user story in the excel backlog, it would have complexity associated with it:

  • "The user can log on the system using a form with id and password"

Some examples of associated tasks, to be done during an iteration. Those will be managed with postit, with not complexity.

  • "Code the logging form, using GWT"
  • "Implement security algorithm to check password validity"
  • "Create a user/password table in the database"
  • "Test the logging form on the integration system"
Bernard Notarianni
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We've been using Accunote (accunote.com). A vendor set it up so I have no idea what it costs, or even if we are sing it properly.

Why it works:

  1. Fairly easy to edit/update.

  2. Easy to modifiy tasks in sprint, copy to/from backlog tab, etc.

  3. Everyone looks at the burndown charts, especially the "by user" one, and that keeps the team working together and gives a sense of accomplishment.

There's probably other tools that do the same, or better (and the Accunote Javascript can be a bit awkward).

Key thing is that it should be really easy to use and have some sort of "team space" where you can all keep an eye on each other and see how each of you are going.

Anon Gordon
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Check out Intervals. We built it as a web design agency with very similar issues as yours. We hadd 4 or 5 guys all tracking time and tasks in xcel documents and it was difficult to get anything done.

jjriv
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This question is mostly a duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12328/what-bug-tracking-software-do-you-use which has a lot of answers - tasks are not necessarily bugs, but good tools let you specify other task types than 'bug'.

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Peter Hilton
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We're using Eventum at the moment to handle our tasks. It may not be the best but it's worth taking a look at. Each "issue" in our case is often broken down features or use cases that is assigned to someone to implement.

Bob Gettys
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We also use Trac, but it does not scale very well. Handling Use Cases and Test Cases may also get cumbersome. It really depends on the scope of the project and the size of the development team. I think for teams with less than 10 people Trac does an excellent job, but after that you are hitting the glass ceiling.

We are starting to take a closer look at Confluence/Jira (perhaps with Greenhopper) as we are starting to outgrow Trac.

Oh, and post its, index cards and whiteboards work really well if everybody is on-site ;-)

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RallyDev.com. Free 5-user community edition and it's actually pretty good!

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For a co-located team nothing beats a big wall and a whole bunch of index cards as far as I'm concerned. Maybe with whiteboard or two for burnup/down charts.

adrianh
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