4 Popular Tools For Agile Project Management

Agile Software Development is a new era of software development. In order to ensure a productive and efficient adherence to agile methodology, agile software development companies follow some agile project management tools. Nowadays, numerous tools are available in the software market. Each of these tools is built solely with definite features.

This article explains the pros and cons of the most popular tools in the market to help you choose the best one that suits your project needs.

1. Jira
Atlassian Jira is an absolute and prominent Agile project management tool in the IT sphere. This has become popular because of its precise customizing features and well-balanced process flows. It is a proven product used by thousands of big companies around the globe. So, it has a large and active community.

A set of out-of-the-box features such as progress visualization, roadmaps, customizable workflows, and custom filters make it well-aligned with any agile project management methodology of software development. It builds with extremely great reports such as burn-down/up charts, sprint reports, velocity charts, and more, allowing the team to monitor the performance in real-time.

Pros

• Numerous features
• Customizable dashboards and Scrum boards
• Flexible Kanban boards
• Realtime progress reports and charts
• Strong backlog management
• User story mapping
• Bug and issue tracking feature
• Time tracking
• Great sprint management features
• Custom filters using JIRA Query Language (JQL)
• Diverse third-party application integrations available
• Mobile app available

Cons

• Complex initial project setup for newbies
• Large learning curve for new users

Pricing
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing

2. Trello

Trello is one of the most popular and intelligible tools for successful Agile stories tracking. Trello boards can be customized and tailored with different third-party tools that make it a most congenial tool for freelancers, small businesses, or among departments of large organizations. It’s built with an adorable user interface that makes it a simple and amazing project management tool in the online world.

Pros

• Most handy project management tool
• Absolutely limitless card creation feature
• Visually appealing user interface
• Having checklists on stories/tasks
• Perform batch handling of cards in a list
• Limitless data storage
• iPhone and Android apps are available
• Seamless notifications
• Powerful free version

Cons

• Less reporting capabilities
• A Basic member having a 10MB file upload limit for each attachment and a Business class member having a 250MB file upload limit.
• Don’t have all agile features
• Limited activity log
• No freeform tags available

Pricing
https://trello.com/pricing

Milanote is another tool more or less on the same lines. It is more of a tool for organizing creative projects into beautiful visual boards. It is a great fit for designers who work in teams remotely.

Key Features:
– Write notes & to-do lists, upload images & files and save things you find on the web.
– Flexible drag and drop interface.
– With a single click, your board becomes a shared workspace for team collaboration.
– Hundreds of built-in templates.

3. Zoho Sprints
Zoho Sprints is a project management tool suitable for both small and large-scale companies. The tool offers an excellent user experience and robust functionalities. The main features that help to keep our team agile are creating user stories, add estimation points, schedule agile meetings, and use timesheets to track work hours.

Pros

• Simple and dynamic user interface
• Very quick and easy project setup feature
• Able to customize the project statuses based on the working context of the user.
• The platform having an internal collaboration feature. The team can chat and save conversations for future references.
• This application is integrated with other Zoho products. So, the user will be able to log in using one password for all of these applications in the suite.
• This platform available on both Android and iOS.
• Team members can log their working hours on the dashboard and it automatically tracks the billable and non-billable hours of each team member. Administrators can approve timesheets on the system and manage sprints and invoices easily.

Cons

• A limited number of projects, users, and space available in the free version.
• Some features are limited to the web interface.
• Need good internet connectivity to avoid interruptions.

Pricing
https://www.zoho.com/sprints/pricing.html

4. GitLab Project Management

GitLab is an open-core Git repository, with built-in Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). They have released a new feature for project management called GitLab Issue Board.

The GitLab Issue Board helps to plan, organize, and visualize a workflow for a feature or product release. The issue boards also have a label feature that helps the teams to create and streamline workflows by defining the lists with different labels.

Pros

• A central platform for code repositories and project management
• Customizable project board
• Highly secure
• Built-in tagging system
• Inbuilt commenting system for team collaboration

Cons

• Limited features
• Poor reporting features
• Dashboard not effective when compared with other project management tool

Conclusion

Agile Manifesto states, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. But it does not mean that tools have no role in an Agile software development environment. As Agile projects are fast-moving and dynamic, effective project management tools are essential for the successful execution of the project. The above-discussed tools can be a great help if you are looking to deploy any Agile software management tools.