A completely free agile software process tool

Question

I know slightly close questions have been asked before but this question is a bit different   We are a start-up company with a very limited budget and we are looking for a completely free Agile software development process tool without any limitation on the number of users  We don t want to have a limitation for the number of users because there could be a lot of people who would do small tasks for us and if they pass the number of user limit all of a sudden we ll have to pay a lot of money for the tool monthly   It would be very useful if it could support    Kanban board Task hierarchy  so that you can define cards within cards  Hosting the tool online  not download  Commenting system Different roles Swimlanes   I have checked a lot of those tools here   http   agilescout com best-agile-scrum-tools   but I didn t find any that is absolutely free for unlimited users  Some of them also don t have a Kanban board  I checked Agilefant but its online version is going to be paid from 2014  I also checked Stackoverflow for this but none of the questions were targeting  completely free tools    Your help will be greatly appreciated

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Although  I m a big fan of Kanban Tool service  it has everything you need except free of charge  and therefore it s difficult for me to stay objective  I think that should go for Trello or Kanban Flow  Both are free and both provide basic features that are essential for agile process managers and their teams

User · Answer

EDIT  Kanbanize is a commercial product and offers a 30 day free trial   Disclosing  I am a co-founder of http   kanbanize com   Mark  I understand your desire to find the perfect application with all these features inside  but I really doubt that you will get it for free  There s a bunch of super cool apps  including Kanbanize  out there  but none of them is completely free   Be careful what you call a Kanban board and what not  though  Trello is definitely NOT a kanban system  no WIP limits  no analytics  etc    It is a great visual management system  but not a Kanban one   Finally  to answer your question  tools that deserve attention in my opinion are  Kanbanize  of course   LeanKit  KanbanTool  Kanbanery and probably a few others  My personal bias is that LeanKit is the most advanced to date followed by Kanbanize and KanbanTool   I hope that helps

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Try http   www icescrum org   It is free to use  And it has lot of cool features  Perfect for scrum teams

User · Answer

Back in 2010 we had the same problem and i successfully employed GoogleDocs with our small Agile Development team  8 Devs in 3 Countries    GoogleDrawing will serve in the exact same way as a physical Scrum board would  with all the upsides of full flexibilty and also the downsides of zero automation but with the big additional upside of being virtual and accessible from anywhere with an internet connection   It also was used for the retrospective at the end of each Sprint  GoogleSpreadsheet was used for a concise list of all the tickets from our bug tracking system  Redmine  manually transfered  and also for the  manually updated  albeit with formulas to calculate the progress  burndown chart   The combination of these different elements is actually quite powerful  as you have the full flexibility over the content and its representation and can have your team communicate via VoIP while all are looking at the same documents and can modify them in real-time   Here an example of the docs used in a sprint  all sensitive data removed     Scrum board Example  GoogleDrawing  Retrospective Example  GoogleDrawing  Burndown Chart Example  GoogleSheet  formulas to automate calculation  Ticket list from Bugtracker  GoogleSheet    As mentioned before  the only downside is the fact that you have to invest some time to maintain and prepare the data for each sprint  but for us that was hugely outweighed by the flexibility and accessibility that the Team of GoogleDocs   VoIP gave us

User · Answer

One possibility would be to use a Google Drawing  part of Google Drive  if you want a more visual and easy-to-edit option  You can create the cards by grouping a color-filled rectangle and one or more text fields together  Being a sufficiently free-form online vector drawing program  it doesn t really limit your possibilities like if you use a more dedicated solution   The only real downsides are that you have to first create the building blocks from the beginning  and don t get numerical statistics like with a more structured tool

User · Answer

Trello com  Trello is free for unlimited users   Period     You almost definitely don t need  Sub-cards    Use the checklists instead  or if you REALLY need sub-cards  don t have a parent sub-card   Just name the tickets something like  Epic - Story A  or  Story - task Z  or whatever     Another idea is to create two boards  did I mention you can have unlimited boards for free too    One for your epics and one for your stories   Call one your product management board and the other your sprint board  or whatever you like     I m not sure what you need different roles for - but  people aren t crazy - they know their job   As a startup if you already have problems getting people to not do crazy things  Where you need to restrict their permissions  you have much much bigger issues   The point is that you need a SMALL tool to help you track stuff   Not a super rigid tool that makes you work in a super specific way   As a new  I assume   startup  you should let your process grow into a tool   Don t beef up your process to fit a tool

User · Answer

You can check out https   kanbanflow com It s free for now because it s in beta and they say there is no time limit   It behaves very similar to AgileZen  I second the google doc  or you could use an online collaborative board that multiple people can edit   Or you can host a more robust excel doc in skydrive from MS   I haven t tried that yet   Mura ly is another one that I am playing with currently   It has unlimited collaborators  though I think you would probably have to invite them everytime   with a free account   Hope that helps

[agile] A completely free agile software process tool

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