Agile tools other than TFS

In my opinion, TFS is a horrible tool for managing your agile process in terms of usability from a developer perspective. What agile tools other than TFS are being used, especially within Thomson Reuters Professional? What is your opinion of their usability?

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Jonathan McGarvey

If you're asking about tools to manage user stories and tasks, the department I'm in has used Version One or Jira/Greenhopper. Neither one is free, but for less than 10 users Jira/Greenhopper is cheap.

Michael Harlow

I used VersionOne in my time on Thomson Reuters News & Insight and was generally pleased with the software.

Good

- There was a "process" to using it which helped in moving from one iteration to another, backlog, and doing retros.
- They had some query-esque ways of easily pulling up groups of items for a specific user, iteration, status, etc where TFS is more open-ended/do-it-yourself
- Virtual taskboard was a cool visualization of progress without being too complex
- Number crunching for estimates/completed work was mostly intuitive
- In-line field changes on list views was handy when it worked

Bad

- Some of the preset things didn't quite match with what we wanted as a team and it was inflexible in that respect sometimes
- The UI was very bulky, refresh-happy, and generally sluggish
- No real easy code-integration (although we don't get it with TFS either for iOS projects)
- Planning took a long time because using the online tool to update stories in mass was time consuming (more a comment on our team)
- Identifiers weren't simple, so it was hard to say "hey look at bug 12345"

After moving to using TFS, there are definitely times when I think that VersionOne is superior to TFS. That said, I think TFS is mostly stable and allows customization to whatever you want to do. With that in mind, I am mostly satisfied with what TFS provides. I think the key is to not force it to manage everything for your team.

Gregory Collins

Microsoft seems to be making some improvements in the Agile space with TFS 11.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2011/09/20/visual-studio-team-foundation-server-11-developer-preview-what-s-new-for-team-foundation-server.aspx

Cheers

Ryan Morlok

Awesome to see. Previously Microsoft had put almost no effort into providing tools that let you visualize what's going on. I'm still curious to see how well these tools play with the complex setup we have in place for Cobalt.

Todd Gardner

"Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools" --Agile Manifesto. Never underestimate the capability of a tool to destroy pragmatic thought. I have never used a tool that was a good as index cards and conversations.

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