Tools for Scrum and Agile Project Management
The first thing to say is that the term “Planning Poker®” is a registered trademark of Mountain Goat Software, the Mike Cohn company. This is why this agile planning practice could be sometimes names differently: scrum poker, agile poker, etc. This article presents a list of free and open source planning poker tools and plugins that are also directly available as online tools.
Even if Agile approaches favor collocated teams, distributed Scrum teams with remote work are more common that what you might think. Many Agile software development teams are based on a virtual organization.
Developed by Atlassian, Jira is a commercial issue tracking tool that allows bug tracking and Agile project management. It is one of the most-widely used tool by Scrum teams working in corporate Agile software development environments.
There are still many open source kanban tools available, contrary to open source projects for Scrum tools that have mostly ended being transformed in a limited offer that supports a main commercial product. The simplicity of the Kanban approach has allowed open source software developers to create and maintain Kanban tools based on various platforms.
Agile approaches like Scrum recommend a “just enough” attitude in software development and this is also the case when you discuss tools. Ideally, you would work with a small team that is collocated, but this is not always possible and you might be running your project virtually with a distributed Scrum team scattered around the world.
Bugzilla is a popular open source bug tracker created originally by the Mozilla Foundation. It has an open architecture that allows extending its basic functionalities. This article lists the Bugzilla plugins, called add-on in Bugzilla, that allows integrating an Agile project management approach like Scrum or Kanban around the bug tracking features of Bugzilla.
Technical debt is a metaphor coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992. This concept refers to the work that needs to be done so that a software development project could be considered as “complete”. Could you try to measure your amount of technical debt? Could you use some tools to do this? These are some of the questions that this article explores.
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