On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 10:01 PM, Steven Walling <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hey all, > > In previous discussions, we've leaned toward calling Trello and Mingle a > pair of complementary tools, with the former being good for small teams and > the latter being good for large teams. I think this is probably true. > > Tomasz said that he's already running in to the limitations of Trello for > teams more invested in Scrum processes like points estimation, burndown (or > up) charts, velocity, and so on. He showed me a little bit about how > they're using a browser extension to hack this stuff in to Trello, but that > he's still having to manually calculate velocity which is a pain. > > Growth is still a very small team, but we're starting to venture down the > path of more Scrum process. This week I did some work to simplify our > Trello board, and reduce it to "Backlog", "Current To Do", "Doing" and > "Done" lists of cards. You can view our current board at > https://trello.com/b/FdtPTV2y > > In the future, I can definitely see Trello breaking down for a larger team > doing sprints, even if you're like me and not particularly interested in > things like velocity. However, I want Mingle to die in a fire, so I > experimented with creating a Pivotal Tracker board, which is public at > https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/955210 > > I have a little experience with Pivotal from working at a startup with > Ward, where their dev team had 100% adoption of this tool. I was outside > the Scrum as a writer, but it was interesting for sure. Beyond the better > usability, mobile apps, etc., I think this is a good tool if we commit more > to Scrum practices. In particular, it does a few things I think are > different than Trello... > > 1. Burndown or up charts can be generated automatically. There are > also other charts and progress reports about points delivered etc. and you > can get RSS feeds of it all. > 2. It seems to have bi-directional integration with any Bugzilla > instance, and API access, so we could create Gerrit integration as well. > 3. It's geared toward having a story requester and owner, and the > product owner explicitly accepts or rejects delivered work. Trello has > pretty much no set roles, by comparison. > 4. Unlike Trello, the card lists are set for you. There's Icebox > (holding area for new stories), Backlog (stories ready to start), Current > (which actually auto-fills from Backlog based on your velocity). Pivotal > also finally made Epics make sense to me. Epics are created from labels you > put on stories, and you can see them in their own list and they have > progress bars etc. > 5. Stories have set types of feature, release, bug, or chore. > 6. Stories get point estimations of course. By default points are not > assigned to bugs or chores, though you can change this. There are different > scales you can set for points, when iterations start/end, iteration length, > and you can either let your velocity get set for you or set it manually. > > *TL;DR: *to me it looks like Pivotal Tracker does everything we need from > Mingle, and is a helluva lot easier to use and understand for people new to > Scrum or only lightly in to it. Please play around, and if you want I can > invite you to be a member of our Growth project there so you can try it > out. > Please invite me :) > > A logistical point: Pivotal is proprietary. It's a small company based in > SF and owned by VMWare. However, they officially give free unlimited access > perpetually to public projects and non-profits. > Would it be an idea to make a shortlist of serious alternatives to Trello and Mingle, both open source and proprietary tools, and compare them? For example, I would like to have a look at kanbanery.com but I am sure that other people would have other suggestions as well. D > > > _______________________________________________ > teampractices mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/teampractices > >
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