A completely free agile software process tool

I know slightly close questions have been asked before but this question is a bit different.

We are a start-up company with a very limited budget and we are looking for a completely free Agile software development process tool without any limitation on the number of users. We don't want to have a limitation for the number of users because there could be a lot of people who would do small tasks for us and if they pass the number of user limit all of a sudden we'll have to pay a lot of money for the tool monthly.

It would be very useful if it could support:

  • Kanban board
  • Task hierarchy (so that you can define cards within cards)
  • Hosting the tool online (not download)
  • Commenting system
  • Different roles
  • Swimlanes

I have checked a lot of those tools here:

http://agilescout.com/best-agile-scrum-tools/

but I didn't find any that is absolutely free for unlimited users. Some of them also don't have a Kanban board. I checked Agilefant but its online version is going to be paid from 2014. I also checked Stackoverflow for this but none of the questions were targeting "completely free tools".

Your help will be greatly appreciated.

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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!

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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.

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最佳答案

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.

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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):

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.

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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.

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Although, I'm a big fan of Kanban Tool service (it has everything you need except free of charge) and therefore it's difficult for me to stay objective, I think that should go for Trello or Kanban Flow. Both are free and both provide basic features that are essential for agile process managers and their teams.

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


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