A completely free agile software process tool [closed]

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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!

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.