StyleCop

StyleCop is a great Visual Studio / Resharper add on to compliment lines of code (LOC) metric tools.

If your team values LOC then StyleCop is for you.

Agile Project Management Team Tools

Hmm ... kinda by definition of 'agile' should the post be about 'team feedback tools' ... but lets skip that. I'll even try to skip the agile/scrum/XP question (is XP or scrum inherently 'agile'? ... darn I did not skip it).

The main players seem to be:

• VersionOne
• Mingle
• Rally
• Scrumworks
• Excel

I have no experience with Mingle or Rally, but have a lot of experience with VersionOne and, over the last few months, with Scrumworks. My impressions are ...

VersionOne

When I first used VersionOne back, I guess about 2004, I thought it was great. But last year (2012) I was on a team using it and it was ... hmmm ... good but not exciting. It offered a very rich feature set,  but it seemed to me to have lost focus on useable features. I remember several years ago a projects page that showed an estimated time of delivery. To me, kinda fundamental. Not really available in the current version.

The good:

• Free for small teams/use with limited features ... very restrictive.
• Large range of features.
• Multiple projects
• Actual effort reporting independent of iteration.
• Great customisation.
• Track lifecyle of user wish list right through to tasks.
• Support for automated release documentation.

 The bad:

• Forget hosting if your not in the US of A. The product does not support time zones and does not update burn down until the end of the day which for me is in the middle of the day ... if your trying to promote team acceptance this is a red flag. (I reported this as an issue several years ago and I know it was also reported in 2012.)
• Hosted options are very very slow.
• No retrospective time entry, which is greatly aggravated by the time zone problem. You cannot enter what you did yesterday.

Scrumworks

After a few months of using it ... I'm not impressed. It provides a web view and a Java application. The two seem to written by different teams. While the web view allows entry of today's effort and updating of "to do" (velocity), the Java application allows editing the original estimate but not the "to do".

The Java application just does not cut the Scrum intent. I cannot see how a team can manage "burn down" using it.

The good:

• Free 
• Retrospective time entry (enter effort tomorrow).

 The bad:

• Primitive
• Different views (Java app / web) have different models.

To me, although I do it, retrospective time entry of effort is a process anti-pattern. If team members cannot be bothered to enter effort before going home then there are more problems than implied here.

Simple, but in the end Excel would be better.

Excel

Dunno, but I think Excel has more to offer.


I summary, today, I would consider other options than VersionOne or Scrumworks. But VersionOne is way better that Scrumworks. Actually, Scrumworks seems to me to be more of an inhibitor than useful  :-(.