We've already spoken several times about the Agile methodology and, specifically, the Scrum framework. We come back to the topic at the beginning of the new year to highlight a recent article written by Ben Aston on the technical blog thedigitalprojectmanager.com, which we really liked, on that same topic. The post title is quite self-explanatory: 11 Of The Best Scrum Tools To Increase Your Team's Productivity. The post is basically a review of eleven Agile & Scrum project management tools that - if properly implemented - could reasonably increase the productivity of any company of working group.
More specifically, the tools reviewed in the article are as follows:
- Jira – https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/
- Target Process – https://www.targetprocess.com/
- Vivify Scrum – https://www.vivifyscrum.com/
- Yodiz – https://www.yodiz.com/
- ScrumDo – https://www.scrumdo.com/
- Quickscrum – https://www.quickscrum.com/
- Manuscript – https://www.manuscript.com/
- Scrumwise – https://www.scrumwise.com/
- Axosoft – https://www.axosoft.com/
- Scrumdesk – https://www.scrumdesk.com/
- Zoho Sprints – https://www.zoho.com/sprints/
Each entry features some screenshots of the agile platform and a short review illustrating its strengths and weaknesses.
Free alternatives
The article is well written and updated to the latest software released on the market over the last few years: however, it mostly focuses on the Agile platforms built for the business and corporate world. Most of these products are quite expensive: some of them are available on-premise (commercial license); most of them adopt a cloud -based approach, with the usual variable pricing plan depending on the number of users and the features that can be activated. Personally, while appreciating the often superior features present on these solutions, we still recommend - at least for the first time - a "simpler" and "cheaper" approach - expecially for those who never tried an Agile framework before. The reason for that is simple: a newcomer could easily feel lost in front of such complete and feature-rich platforms, and spend a lot of months (while paying an expensive fee) learning how to properly use it.
For such reasons, the Scrum platform we recommend for starters in 2019 is still the excellent - and completely free - EasyBacklog, which we reviewed in this article and is still rocking. As a viable alternative, we also suggest to try Trello, a free project management suite that can easily be configured for Agile development frameworks (including, yet not limiting to, Scrum): we briefly talked about Trello in this post.
If you know other great free or paid alternatives which are worth mentioning, leave us a comment and we'll put them in this article. Until then... Happy development!
