Thursday, November 7, 2013

Scrum Tools: ScrumDo



I only had a limited amount of time to review ScrumDo, but I was very impressed in the short time that I was able to spend with it.  The philosophy of ScrumDo is:

"We aim at providing the best and easy to use Agile story management application for distributed teams to manage agile projects easily. Our mission is to introduce the easiest way to manage your Scrum projects. We at ScrumDo believe that the tool should not become the process..."

I emphasized the last sentence because when you interact with the product it is evident that they wanted the tool to get out of the way of the process.  It's very intuitive to use like Trello (see my earlier review) but in this case you can tell that the tool was specifically designed for Scrum and Agile, rather than for a broader application.  It also doesn't feel like a heavy-weight enterprise tool and is extremely easy to use out of the box.  

Pros
  • It is very easy to create epics, stories, and tasks within stories.  
  • You can also create multiple projects. 
  • It was easy to set up a new sprint (they call it an iteration) and add stories to the backlog and move them back and forth between iterations.  
  • There is a way to easily prioritize epics and reorder backlogs via drag and drop
  • The scrum board is also nicely laid out and easy to use.  
  •  I didn't gather enough status to create them for my test project, but screen shots of burndown charts show that their reporting feature seems very well done.

Cons
  • Searching and reporting on custom groups of issues does seem to be rather limited, but according to a recent blog post they have enhanced their query syntax to provide for better searching.  
  • Release planning is not natively supported, but users can manage this by making a project equal to a release, tracking releases by epics, or using tags to assign a story or epic to a release.
  • Configuration and customization seem limited although that is to be expected for a tool that wants to maintain simplicity and ease of use.  I did see mention that swim lanes/workflow on the scrum board could be customized, but I couldn't quickly figure out how to change from the standard To Do / Doing / Reviewing / Done.

Time tracking and email notification were not enabled for me in the free version so I can't comment on how well they have been implemented.  Planning poker is also not enabled in the free version, but stories and epics have an easy way to assign story points. 

Pricing

Plans range from absolutely free for a limited-functionality, 3 user plan to $149.95 a month for 50 user access. Yearly pricing plans are also available.  The free 3 user plan is great for trying out the product and gives you a good flavor of what it's about, but it is missing key features that I would want, such as email notification and time tracking, not to mention the 3 user limit is quite restricted.  Most smaller development shops would be happy with the 25 or 50 user plans that provide the complete feature set.  

ScrumDo – Free and Sweet Open Source Scrum is a helpful review that provides more detail and screen shots of the application if you want to take a closer look without signing up yourself.

Bottom line: if you're a small to mid-size development shop checking out ScrumDo is definitely worth your while. Larger enterprise organizations could benefit as well, and might want to explore the yearly pricing models.

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