Top 6 agile tools for project management

Much has changed since the Agile Manifesto first appeared. At the time, programmers were revolting against the tyranny of the specs document and the rigid, lock-step organization of work. Let us be free, they said, and we can work faster and more productively. But that also meant constant reorganization and a lot of Post-it notes and bulletin boards and scraps of paper and arrows pointing everywhere.

Today we have fully realized tool suites that support the process. The poor handwriting, dried adhesives and multi-colored confusion of paper has been replaced with the precision and infinite attention of database-backed web applications.

Moreover, the rituals and routine of agile development has grown so popular that others in the company are taking notice. Some of the tools don’t limit themselves to the work of turning out code. They aim their marketing at any team that needs to solve a problem. This may be annoying to programmers who find that some of the tools don’t focus directly on the tasks associated with software development such as commits and deployment. But it’s best to see this innovation as a compliment, a recognition of the smart work that the programming world has done. 

Here are 6 of the most intriguing options for keeping everyone working together and pulling in something approximating the same direction.

Zoho Sprints

Zoho is known for building a complete suite of office tools, and its collection of agile tools will be familiar to anyone using Zoho’s office suite. One such tool, Sprints, manages agile projects and it looks just as clean and spare as the rest of Zoho’s toolset with lots of white space and a menu on the left.

The structure is also clean. Work is broken into tickets that fill up a backlog. These can be organized into “Epics” and then monitored from a Kanban board during each sprint. All of this is plotted in graphical glory on the dashboard. The reporting tool breaks down time spent into tables of numbers and graphs for managers who are counting the beans.

What’s more uncommon is a section for tracking rituals such as daily standups or post-sprint retrospectives. They are automatically scheduled and tracked to keep everything moving.

Sprints also has an integrated discussion group called Feed that makes it a bit easier to link tickets with the debate that invariably ensues. It also carries updates as tickets get moved across the board. It’s like Slack but integrated.

There’s a small opportunity for customization because you can add extra fields and values to the various forms. If you don’t like the standard “high,” “medium” and “low” priorities, for instance, you can add others like “boss’s pet” or “silly.”

Pricing begins at $10 per month for a basic plan that’s limited to 12 users. Bigger plans include integration with source control (GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab) and customization options.

Jira

Jira is one of the original pioneers in this area and remains very popular due to sophisticated graphics and a robust feature set. Its developer, Atlassian, is rolling out the next generation of the app and it offers a wider variety of options for configuration that can be performed directly in the app itself. There’s no need to write code or customization templates because it’s now going to be handled more with clicks to a responsive interface. You can still use the older version but I think most will embrace the next generation.

The new options add flexibility to the classic structure that begins with a roadmap and then takes tickets from backlog to sprint board to done. You can add elements like images to make the tickets easier to visualize and see as they move across the board. In general, these templates are now more flexible and easier for everyone on the team to modify as they allow teams to evolve their own fields and formats that are separate from the others.

There are also sophisticated features such as the ability to craft rules that are applied in response to events. These add structure by either triggering automatic actions or limiting what people might try to do. One rule, for instance, might assign each new ticket to a manager who then would assign it to the right person. These little customizations will save many clicks.

There are deeper connections to the other Atlassian tools such as the code repository BitBucket or Confluence, its planning tool. Atlassian’s Pipelines also integrates continuous testing and deployment. The Jira brand name is also appearing on more customized versions such as the Jira Service Desk.

Pricing starts at $10 per month for up to 10 developers. After that, the price for the “standard” plan is $7 per month per user. A premium plan with better support and unlimited file storage is $14 per month per user.

Monday.com

The Monday interface is built to be beautiful and colorful, open to all project managers not just software development teams. The main interface comprises tracking boards that can be customized with various columns and fields that track details like how many tasks are completed or when approval was granted.

The wide audience for Monday is visible in the collection of starter templates, which range from generic projects to more specialized workflows such as keeping a blog or magazine filled with new content. You can always change or customize them, but they have several dozen starting spots to choose from.

Development teams may want to use the integrated APIs to connect with tools like Jira that are more focused on software development. Indeed, developers may do their basic reporting and tracking with these development-centric tools and then let the reporting flow up to project managers who might like the cleaner, more colorful interface Monday provides.

There’s also a calendar for organizing the upcoming week and an internal email box for mixing communication in with the tracking. All of this information can be tracked with a mobile app.

Pricing starts at $17 per month for two users for a basic plan and the price per user drops to $5 per month as the team gets bigger. The Pro and Enterprise plans, though, add many of the more important features, such as more sophisticated data presentation and the ability to integrate with other tools. The list price for these plans is roughly $12 per user per month for larger teams.

Kanbanize

The boards from Kanbanize take their name from the main Kanban interface for tracking tickets or cards as the team tackles them. The fields on the cards can easily be customized and only the essential fields can be displayed.

The cards generate events as they’re created, assigned or moved along the steps of the workflow and these events can be linked to rules for customizing the action. These can be developed in the tool’s graphical user interface making it possible for non-programming leadership to add automation to the process.

More power, though, is hidden beneath the surface. Kanbanize offers a number of meta-reporting views for analyzing how quickly work is accomplished, whether it’s being completed, and where the bottlenecks and roadblocks might be. The scatter plots and heat maps  are probably best for projects with tasks that lend themselves to statistical insights. If you’ve got one of those, you can try a Monte Carlo simulation to predict just when all of the work will be done.

Prices start at $99 per month for the basic system for up to 15 users. Larger groups tend to cost about $5 to 6 per user per month. Adding security, turning on rules-based actions, or adding analytical views are all additional.

BugDigger

Testing and quality assurance are a part of every software development methodology but the work grows more important when you’re iterating rapidly and deploying new code frequently. Each change should be tested and any issues should be identified and fed back into the development process.

BugDigger automates some of the most annoying tasks of testing web apps with a browser plugin that installs a simple bug reporting button in the toolbar. Pressing the button triggers a new report that automatically includes data about the URL, other open windows and the browser state. A screenshot of the bad section is ready to be pasted.

Reports can be routed to many of the major agile tracking websites and some of the most prominent tools get an optimized version.

Plans start at $19 per month for up to ten users. Larger plans that include better data retention and API access for 100 or more users start around $100 per month.

Asana

The sales literature for Asana does not focus on the work of programmers, speaking in the more general language of projects, workflow and teams. Its bright, colorful charts aren’t just for development teams but all of the corporation. This larger focus can be helpful in organizations where coders are working closely to support the rest of the business. In other words, for companies that are doing something more than making software.

There are several dozen templates for tabular data collection to support diverse groups such as operations (“facilities requests,” “vendor management”) or HR (“candidate tracking,” “interview questions”). Many of these can be used for tasks around the programming team but there are also a number devoted to software creation (“sprint retrospective,” “software and systems deployment”).

Much of the tools are meant to support the wide-open creativity that often flows during strategic planning sessions and design reviews. Bug reporting and software deployment are easily integrated but they almost take a back seat to the larger plans for the tools.

Prices begin at $11 per month per user for the premium plan with custom templates, task dependencies and private teams. Prices rise to $25 per month per user for a tier that includes more collaborative tools (forms, portfolios) and mechanisms for interacting (design proofing and workload). A generous introductory tier for teams up to 15 people is free and there are other discounts for small teams.

For a deeper look at Asana, see “Asana review: Intelligent, adaptive project management.”

Credit: Peter Wayner , Computerworld.