SingleFeed Blog

Here at SingleFeed we’re big believers in trying to work in an agile way — taking on the work in bite-sized chunks, getting them done, and seeing what’s next, rather than attacking a huge monolithic project and not seeing results until it’s done. As part of managing that work, we use Jira to track items that need attention, as detailed in a previous post. For breaking down a project into the aforementioned bite-sized chunks and tracking progress, however, we’re looking at other tools.

Certainly, there’s the good old “task list in TextEdit” approach, or using Excel to list what needs to be done and tracking things old-school. There are better, more modern ways, however. Jira has a plugin called GreenHopper which seems interesting, but it’s fairly complex and expensive. Right now we’re interested in testing things out and keeping investment low, so we’ve been looking at tools such as Pivotal Tracker, AgileBuddy, and ScrumNinja. AgileBuddy isn’t free while the others are, but it’s not expensive either. At the moment, we’re trying out ScrumNinja on one of our current projects, and so far it’s simple but gets the job done. We’ll see what we think when we’re done with the project.

Tools are useful, but only if they aid a process that everyone buys into and that gets things done in a healthy way. Since Agile development can mean so many different things, it’s important to decide on your process first and then find the right tool, rather than allow a tool to change your process in ways that might not be right for your team. We’ll report back after our experiments, and in the meantime welcome other suggestions and descriptions of other experiences.