Agilo for Scrum™

A very lean tool with a bit of spice and some rough corners to smooth, but really effective!

Andrea Tomasini rated it a 10 on (November 08, 2008)

Agilo is based on Trac, which alone as an extremely wide user base, and is one of the most used ticketing system in the agile community. Agilo adds to Trac a couple of significant improvement, that alone, without even considering the specific Scrum features are worth of a look: ticket typing, csv import and ticket linking. These three feature which deeply change the core usability of the tool, allowing to implement in a very easy and natural way, "just enough" structure on top of trac, to make it able to better support your way of working are extremely valuable. Moreover the new version of agilo 0.7 offer a set of very interesting feature specific to scrum, and still allow you to personalize almost everything, making it as lean as you like. The look & feel has also greatly improved, even though there are still some rough edges, for example the ticket handling, still in the "traditional" trac way is not fitting anymore with the advanced and configurable backlog handling. I am confident that these aspects: inline ticket creation, better drag & drop support, and other "intuitive" transformations will occur pretty soon, the tool as an active community (http://groups.google.com/group/agilo) where scrum related issues and features are discussed and supported by the development team, that collaborate intensively with everyone encountering problems in the tool installation and configuration. The tool offers some unique and handy features, that helps the team in better understanding what the status is (not only through the burndown chart) as well as speeding up some operation at specific Scrum cerimonies. As an example automatically calculating (on a set of well defined user stories and tasks, selectable by the team) the ratio of Story Points/Ideal Hours (Days) that gives the possibility to the team to have a quick check with the capacity set by individual team members and see if the initial commitment is fitting (more or less) in the team available hours. Well is a click instead of a lot of Excel work, and the results is reflected also in the burndown chart. The tool also stores metrics on the team performances, that help the team in monitoring its efficiency and historical data, and see the improvements. Very handy is also the Timeline view, that is enriched with informations related to Sprints and other specific Scrum cerimonies, that allows a very fast wrap up at the Retrospective, allowing the team to inspect & adapt effectively. Thanks for the great tool :-) ANdreaT