Scrumming with the Trac Project

I got an email from ScrumMaster Andrea about an update I should do to my Scrum Tools Roundup post. Andrea drew my attention to the Agilo for Scrum tool, an open source add-on for the Trac Project. The Trac project is a wiki/issue tracking system (written in Python, my #2 favourite language next to C# these days) which has been around for ages and quite successful in it's own right. Agilo for Scrum is an add-on that sits on top of Trac and provides features to support the Scrum process.

I tried Agilo out this morning with a few projects. I always keep some data in Excel of some past projects with things like user stories, releases, iteration lengths, tasks, etc. that can be plugged into some tool for testing. It's my reference data for doing evaluations of tools like this.

The tool looks great. It has all the basics you need in a tool to support your use of the Scrum process (daily stand-up, burndown charts, etc.). A nice feature is the ability to link items together. This also has the capability of copying information from parent to child. Being able to do this, you can create some useful relationships with tasks relating to features, features relating to iterations or sprints, and all of these rolling up to releases (or whatever way you want to organize your projects). A key thing missing from tracking tools is the ability to link these items together easily. This facilitates creating a dashboard view of the project so you know at a glance where things are. Not something easily accomplished with an Excel spreadsheet. An added bonus with Agilo for Scrum is the ability to navigate back and forth between the relationships. Neat.

Something that I've come to realize over the years, it's not the tool that fixes the problem. Taking a more lean approach to things, if you need a tool to fix some problem you have a real problem on your hands. For example if you *need* a tool to manage your Scrum process, it might be an indicator that your Scrum process is too complicated. While I'm happy to see all of these tools out there evolving (and more new ones popping up), I'm a strong advocate of "fix the problem" rather than "get a tool" mentality. YMMV.

One note I wanted to mention. Being a blogger you make posts of course (well, duh!). These are sometimes series, or popular individual posts but they come back. 6 or 12 months later that original post might need some update love. That's the cool thing is that you can go back, look at what you've done and apply some new knowledge to it creating something interesting for everyone out there. I have a large backlog in my blog queue of just posts I've written that need updating like this, this, and this. Nothing like keeping yourself busy with your own work eh?

Anywho, check out the Agilo for Scrum tool here if you have Trac and if you're looking for a good bug tracking tool, you can't go wrong with Trac so check it out here.