What is the best Scrum tool from Google Apps Marketplace?

In the first part of these series we reviewed 5 Google Docs templates for managing your Scrum team. In this second part we will review Scrum tools from the Google Apps Marketplace.

Searching for "Scrum" in the Apps Marketplace returns 4 products. TaskPoint however doesn't have any integration with Google Apps services so I decided not to review it.

This is not an in-depth review. Based on my experience with Scrum, I wanted to get an overall idea on how well each tool could support distributed Scrum. My personal ratings are shown in this table.

Product	Google Apps Integration	Scrum	Kanban	Pricing	Rating
Bright Green Projects	Single Sign-on Universal navigation			Free for 3 users $20/month/per additional user
Acunote	Single Sign-on Universal navigation			Free for 5 users Other package start at $49/month
Gravity	Single Sign-on Universal navigation Calendar Mail			Free for 3 projects Paid version not yet available

What did I like and what do I think can be improved on these tools.

Bright Green Projects

Bright Green Project Visual Wall

• Like
• Visual Wall
• Supports release planning
• Help by chat
• Could be improved
• Limited Help
• Unclear use of terminology for Scrum users

You Tube introduction to Bright Green Projects

Acunote

Acunote Current sprint overview

• Like
• Straightforward Scrum
• Burndown charts
• Good help
• Integration with bug tracking tools (Mantis,..)
• Could be improved
• No support for release planning
• No visual wall

You Tube introduction to Acunote

Gravity

Gravity Visual Task Board

• Like
• Very intuitive
• Straightforward Scrum
• Visual wall
• Good support trough email
• Could be improved
• Still in Beta
• Limited online help

Conclusion

• Gravity is my personal favorite because of its simplicity. The only tool that got me going in seconds.

• I particularly like the visual walls in Bright Green Projects and Gravity. This kind of wall comes close to a white board and is much better in giving an overview of the tasks then any other list.

• Overall I'm a bit disappointed in the integration with Google Apps and its collaborative features. Hopefully these features will be further exploited by the makers of the tools.

So what is your opinion on these tools?

Scrum tools for distributed teams

We've been working with geographically distributed teams over the last couple of years. The following quote from the World Finance magazine is summarizing something we have experienced and witnessed at customers and peers in the European software industry.

"There is a fundamental imbalance in the global economy; in the post-industrial nations, capital is cheap, but labor is expensive. Conversely, in the developing world, capital is scarce but labor is plentiful. Economically this would suggest the huge potential for mass immigration. Yet politically with today's pressures on emerging multicultural societies, it is a total non-starter.

That's why off shoring could be seen as the most acceptable route forward to politicians and businessmen who embrace globalization. Thanks to the advances in low cost digital communications, the world economy is on the verge of Offshoring 2.0 - a revolutionary new paradigm in the way we do business.

In the very near future, for small and medium size businesses, having partners in Eastern Europe, Asia or Africa will no longer seem exotic, but the norm". (1)

By talking to customers and partners we have seen them experimenting with a lot of different tools to create virtual teams.

To boost this, we developed a Scrum template for Google Docs. The template supports the Scrum development process.

The Google platform allows for real-time collaboration between software team members around the world, without installing any software or additional hardware, giving you the time to do your job (instead of administrating tools or hardware).

Add to this Skype or web conferencing tools and your distributed Agile team is ready.

The template is completely free and documentation is provided. Get the template on scrumtoolbox.com.

Hope it helps in creating your software products!

(1) http://www.worldfinance.com/news/home/finalbell/article120.html