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CBT Nuggets

Agile-Scrum-Tools
FeaturedFrameworks

Agile or Scrum Tools – What Works For You?

by IPowerIdeas May 22, 2018

Are you looking for Agile or Scrum tools?  I did some basic research and looked at a number of sources to provide a high-level summary of several tools that were suggested or recommended by Agile and Scrum users.  This is not by any means a detailed summary nor do I want to make a recommendation (as I have used many of these tools).  This site is about planting seeds, I Power Seeds, to provide basic information to the reader providing a foundation to get you started in the direction that is right for you and your company.  Empowering you, or the “I”, with information and knowledge.

 

Good luck and please leave comments, feedback, or suggestions for Agile or Scrum tools.

 

Asana

Generally a 4-4.5 starts (out of 5)

 

Asana is a web and mobile application designed to help teams track their work. It was founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and ex-engineer Justin Rosenstein, who both worked on improving the productivity of employees at Facebook.

 

Asana is web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) designed to improve team collaboration. It focuses on allowing users to manage projects and tasks online without the use of email. In April 2012, Asana released its application programming interface (API) to third-party developers. Asana is integrated with productivity tools including Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, Zapier, Harvest, Instagantt, Jira, Zendesk, and DigiSpoke. In May 2013, Asana launched Organizations, which enables companies to adopt Asana at enterprise scale. Organizations added an Asana Team Browser, a user dashboard, employee auto-join and IT administration abilities related to provisioning and permissions. In January 2015, Asana released its native Android app. In November 2017, Asana released the app in French and German. In March 2018, Asana announced a new interactive feature called Timeline, which business can use to visualize and map out their projects.

 

Reception
Asana received a 4.5 / 5 from PC Magazine (October 13, 2017), which named it an Editors’ Choice and called it “one of the best collaboration and productivity apps for teams.” The article remarked on Asana’s “thoughtful design, fluid interactive elements, and generous member allotment.”

 

Asana

 

Trello

Generally 4.5-5 starts (out of 5)

 

Trello is a web-based project management application originally made by Fog Creek Software in 2011, that was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in 2014 and later sold to Atlassian in January 2017. The company is based in New York City.

 

On January 26, 2017, PC Magazine gave Trello a 3.5 / 5, calling it “flexible” and saying that “you can get rather creative,” while noting that “it may require some experimentation to figure out how to best use it for your team and the workload you manage.”

Trello

 

JIRA

Generally 3.5-4 starts (out of 5)

 

Jira is a proprietary issue tracking product, developed by Atlassian. It provides bug tracking, issue tracking, and project management functions. The product name is a truncation of Gojira, the original Japanese word that was anglicised to Godzilla, itself a reference to Jira’s main competitor, Bugzilla. It has been developed since 2002. According to one ranking method, as of June 2017, Jira is the most popular issue management tool.

 

According to Atlassian, Jira is used for issue tracking and project management by over 75,000 customers in 122 countries around the globe. Some of the organizations that have used Jira at some point in time for bug-tracking and project management include Fedora Commons, Hibernate, Twitter, Skype Technologies, NASA, the United States Department of Defense, and The Apache Software Foundation, which uses both Jira and Bugzilla. Jira includes tools allowing migration from competitor Bugzilla.

 

JIRA

 

Rally (scrum) – Now Agile Management

Generally 4-4.5 starts (out of 5)

 

The Rally acquisition brings to CA leading agile software and services expertise to help businesses consistently and quickly develop high-quality software. Not only do Rally’s offerings complement and expand CA strengths in DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management, but they open up a whole new range of opportunities in a world driven by software. The powerful combination of Rally and CA will help organizations deliver value faster and make confident, agile decisions as a matter of everyday business.

 

Rally-Scrum

 

VSTS

Generally 4-4.5 starts (out of 5)

 

Visual Studio Team System Profiler is a commercial profiler offered by Microsoft, available as part of the Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) suite and the Development Edition of Visual Studio. It can work either in sampling mode, in which the snapshot of the program state is recorded at certain intervals, or in instrumentation mode, where statistic gathering probes are injected at entry and exit point of functions. While the instrumentation mode allows more accurate statistics to be gathered, it also makes the program run more slowly while being profiled.

 

The VSTS profiler helps to optimize performance of code targeted for the .NET platform or natively compiled Visual C++ code. Modern versions of the VSTS profiler can be used to profile both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows programs. The profiler reports performance characteristics for methods which are called during a given run of the profiler including the number of calls to the function and the call stack when the function was called.

 

From within the profiler, the application is launched and executed normally for a period of time. When the user decides to exit the program, the profiler gives a summary of the number of times that each function was called, the elapsed time of each function, and the memory consumed by objects.

 

A standalone version of the VSTS profiler can also be installed from the Visual Studio Team System DVD, and is also available for download on the Microsoft website. While the standalone profiler can be installed or used on any platform, the results it collects can only be analyzed in a version of Visual Studio which includes the profiler.

 

VSTS

 

Axosoft

Generally 3.5-4 starts (out of 5)

 

Axosoft (formerly OnTime) is a proprietary project management and bug tracking system developed by Axosoft, LLC. The system is available as hosted or on-premises software. Project managers and developers are able to visually see each task, requirement, defect and incident in the system on individual filing cards through the Scrum planning board. Axosoft operates as a web application and has the capabilities to integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio and TortoiseSVN.

 

Axosoft, LLC was founded on August 1, 2002 and is headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona.

 

Recognition
In November 2010, Axosoft OnTime was named the Microsoft Visual Studio Magazine 2010 Readers Choice Award Winner for the Collaboration, Project Management and Agile Solutions category.

 

Axosoft

 

Agilo

Generally 3-4 starts (out of 5)

 

Agilo for Trac (formally known as Agilo for Scrum) is an open source, web-based Scrum tool to support the agile Scrum software development process. Agilo is based on Trac, a widely used Issue tracking system. It is programmed in Python and is distributed under the Apache Software License 2.0.

 

Its development was started in January 2007 by Andrea Tomasini while at agile42 and the first public version was released in January 2008. Since August 2011 it has been named to Agilo for Trac to emphasize its binding with Trac.

 

Agilo is used in agile software development projects in all economic sectors who use the Scrum framework. The python application can be downloaded and used either as source tarball, python-egg, SaaS, a VMWare Virtual appliance or a Windows Installer.

 

Version 0.8 is based on Trac 0.11, later versions on Trac 0.12. Starting from release 0.9.15 (1.3.15 PRO) Agilo for Trac is based on Trac 1.0.11.

 

Agilo supports Scrum-Teams, ScrumMasters and Product Owners in running and coordinating agile software development projects.

 

Reported users of Agilo include groups at Volkswagen, AT&T, Siemens, eBuddy, and Oracle Corporation.

 

Agilo

 

Scrumworks

Generally 4.5-5 starts (out of 5)

 

CollabNet is a software development and delivery solutions provider headquartered in South San Francisco, California. All of CollabNet’s solutions and services are used to improve the ways and means of software development. They fit in the industry categories covered by DevOps, application lifecycle management (ALM), and application release automation (ARA).

 

About
CollabNet TeamForge is an ALM platform used to organize complex, distributed teams and projects from a single platform. CollabNet DevOps Lifecycle Manager (CollabNet DLM) is an enterprise DevOps product used to help organizations integrate DevOps toolchains for tracking and reporting of the entire software development lifecycle. The company also partners closely with Clarive Software, which provides a release management solution to automate software deployment and releases. CollabNet offers Clarive solutions directly to customers. CollabNet also has a long history in the Agile space and is one of the industries’ largest Scrum trainers. It also provides Agile consulting and training services to supplement its product offerings.

 

CollabNet customers span finance, healthcare, government, high-tech, and other industries in 100 countries. CollabNet partners with technology providers such as HP and Microsoft, solutions providers and systems integrators including UNICOM and Hitachi Solutions, and resellers such as Carahsoft and Code Experts. The company also partners with #YesWeCode, a Dream Corps initiative designed to bring free technology training and industry connections to 100,000 young people in communities of color and increase local talent for the technology industry.

 

Scrumworks

 

 

Most of this information was taken off Wikipedia.

 

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Pitfalls of Agile
FrameworksManagement

5 Biggest Pitfalls of New Agile Adopters

by IPowerIdeas April 19, 2018

This is a simple and short video about Agile and some of the pitfalls of new adopters. It is an interesting video and helps to get you started on understanding where potential pitfalls could stem from and how to identify them early. It also helps to offer ideas and ways to recognize other distractions and if you can identify them early it will help you find solutions as quickly as possible.

 

One of the things I like about Agile and Scrum are the Sprints and how they embrace getting development done quickly as well as the model or framework incorporates continuous improvement which I am a huge proponent of. I think of how many projects I have been involved in that could have been completed quicker and with less hiccups or distractions by utilizing the general concepts of sprints.

 

I think utilizing sprint-like processes in other projects could have helped complete them sooner by not using the waterfall method. I think there are projects where using the waterfall method is unavoidable. However, there are many times the Agile or Scrum methods could increase efficencies by taking small chunks of the project, completing them in small and time-based periods, assessing what went wrong or what could have been done better after each sprint, and then adjust accordingly. I think it is something worth exploring in your own processes and environment.

 

The other component of a sprint is working closely with the Product Owner and/or Stakeholders on a daily basis which will keep projects from derailing or stalling as well as rapidly removing speedbumps or roadblocks.

 

My I Power Seed challenge is to spend time in the Agile and Scrum frameworks and see if you can utilize its methods and subsequent results and if they can be incorporated into what you are doing in your specific business model (outside of software development).

 

Either way, Agile is a great project management framework that produces results.

 

Please comment and offer feedback.

 

Certified Scrum Master – Simona Millham

 

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5-Myths-of-Scrum
Videos

5 Scrum Myths (Mostly False)

by IPowerIdeas April 17, 2018

This is a nice video about some myths about Scrum (and Agile) software development. It is a recorded webinar but has good content. It is hosted by Simona Millham of CBT Nuggets. I posted in previous posts that I had used CBT Nuggets a long time ago and was not impressed with it and preferred class-based training. However, I recently purchased CBT Nuggets for my team and I started using it and just really enjoy the format – quick 3-8 min videos with a quiz after each video. I have my OneNote open and take notes during each video and I have found I am learning and retaining a lot more because I am visually seeing the creative and energetic presentations as well as writing it down at the same time to reinforce what I just learned in the video.

 

I hope you enjoy this short video.

 

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