11–14 of 14 posts
IMO, Comparing between scrum and kanban is pointless. As long as you have good periodic retrospectives, you'll find the team correcting itself to what works the best.
Never underestimate the power of stickies and a wall. I'd do a very simple do/doing/done online board along with it when remote co-workers were involved. IMO, Comparing between scrum and kanban is pointless. As long as you have good periodic retrospectives, you'll find the team correcting itself to what works the best.
JIRA is feature dense, but everyone hates it. The interface is complex and the learning curve is silly. We waste valuable hours fighting the tool. It was not made for software developers. It was a trouble ticket tool that treats software projects as if they were high priority catastrophes.
Trello is too malleable. Long story short, the question became, "Why don't we use sticky notes?" Sticky notes didn't work because we have 1 remote employee and a fistful of executives that demand involvement in tracking sprint progress (lolololo) but they are unwilling to sacrifice 10 minutes for standups or a trip downstairs to see the board.
At the end of the day, we spend time arguing about how to reduce friction for the development team and ignoring their needs because we already purchased JIRA licenses. If I started my own company, we would request features and track progress in the issue tracker of the source control product our devs chose. If project managers, scrum masters, execs, and other parties have a need for another project management tool they're welcome to use whatever integrates with the issue tracker.
The entire point of practicing agile development is to produce better software faster. Move decision making closer to the problem. Therefore, I don't understand why we can't manage our developers closer to the codebase. Every time they come up for air to the project management tool for someone else's benefit is a context switch that costs us. You wouldn't hire a mechanic to fix your car and tell him that he had to bring all of his tools to your garage to work.
If your clients or internal customers are using your issue tracker, they are actively showing you which features or bugs are impacting them the most. My experience is that JIRA, Trello or anything similar encourages you to create an interpretation layer for your customer's emotional responses. If you teach them to interact with your internal projects as if they were contributing to an open source project, you get a first person account of their priorities, and you may yourself with less empty stares around the room during product reviews.
However, Pivotal had decided to get out of the business of providing software that other people could install behind their firewall, and instead went to a pure SaaS model. So, the lost the business of a Fortune20 company that insists on running everything behind their firewall.
During the time I was there, I heard lots of discussions about alternatives, but nothing was considered satisfactory. One guy kept saying that we should just go ahead and choose Jira, because we all knew that is what management would force us to do regardless.
I never did hear what they finally chose. When my contract was up, I hightailed it back to Austin ASAP because CA was just way too bloody expensive.