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I'm going to be starting a .com. I'm in the pre-stages right now of creating a business plan. Once I start to code I want a free Agile based Project software to track my code and bugs. I'm using MS Project for just the Work Breakdown Structure which is good enough for just a nice list but I want some good Agile software that won't cost me a thing.

Sure I want bug and task tracking but more importantly be able to see the "big picture" just like you can in MS project. I know MS project is not agile based but something like that where I can see an overview of resources, tasks list, etc. in a graph and list based way. Something like VersionOne but free.

This needs to be able to run in Windows.

razlebe
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PositiveGuy
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  • Possible dup: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/293292/software-tool-for-agile-project-management, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/35760/best-scrum-tools, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/494801/free-open-source-scrum-backlog-tool – Pascal Thivent Oct 12 '09 at 08:23
  • @Pascal - those are close, especially the first link, but this question does specify *free* which probably merits a distinct question. – Jeff Sternal Oct 12 '09 at 13:48
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    I think your requirements are paradoxical. You're asking for Agile software that shows the type of information found in a Waterfall process. – Brian Kelly Oct 12 '09 at 19:28
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    @splith: No, "agile" does not mean "withuot a plan". You still need the task list and resources, but they might be blurrier and more frequently updated. – erikkallen Aug 18 '10 at 22:06

9 Answers9

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Rally fits the bill, is quite good, and the community edition (1 project for up to 10 users) is free.

Jeff Sternal
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  • Hmm, I know my answer was a bit terse, but it wasn't clear that the question required much more since Rally fits the bill. Why the downvote? – Jeff Sternal Oct 13 '09 at 19:30
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Pivotal Tracker is a pretty good free tool, but it tracks your project backlog in typical Agile terms (not code and bugs per se), and it runs online (as a hosted service, not as an installable product). For code and issues, and running on a specific server of yours rather than online, consider e.g. Mercurial, Trac, and TracMercurial (you could also use Trac directly with Subversion, but distributed systems such as Mercurial are the emerging thing -- check them out;-).

There are no doubt other combinations based on other distributed versioning systems such as git and Bazaar, but I'm less familiar with them.

BTW, if you do see the advantages of using "software as a service" rather than doing your own system administration, backups, &c, Bitbucket does free online Mercurial hosting with a homebrew issue tracker (and also integrates with Lighthouse, Twitter, FogBugz, Basecamp, CIA.vc, and other software yet), and similar arrangements exist for other version control systems.

Free hosting plans do of course have limits (e.g., Bitbucket's free plan is limited to 150MB), but upgrading to large teams, multiple repositories, large codebases, &c, is all pretty painless in terms of pricing plans -- if you consider the "costs of ownership" of running your own servers (especially in terms of system administrators), you can see why "software as a service" (aka software "in the cloud") is gradually taking over -- being able to start for free and only pay if and when you need to consume more hosting resources is attractive, and of course, since we're talking about open-source software, you can always decide to switch to "your own servers" approaches any time if there's a business case for it.

Alex Martelli
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  • I'm looking for Agile Project Management which the tool will handle bugs, tasks, etc. plus management in viewing iterations, timeline, etc. for Agile specifically. – PositiveGuy Oct 12 '09 at 02:29
  • It must track bugs so thanks for that heads up that Pivotal doesn't. – PositiveGuy Oct 12 '09 at 02:31
  • You can track bugs with Pivotal Tracker. When you click Add Story, change the "Feature" dropdown to "Bug". – Brian Kelly Oct 12 '09 at 08:48
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    Update: *Pivotal Tracker* is no longer a free service. It is free only for public projects, individuals, non-profits and academic institutions. – Ron Klein Feb 08 '11 at 15:25
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Use redmine. It's written on Ruby on Rails and is amazing!

Alex. S.
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    Another vote for redmine. It can handle subprojects out of the box so you can track and link issues across projects. Something which TRACs can't do really, it is possible but needs a bit of hacking. It links in well to version control systems, we use it linked to mercurial. – Adrian Oct 12 '09 at 09:54
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    I second redmine, we use it here in the office (Were a MS.net shop!), its really fast, integrates well, and actually looks very professional as opposed to many bug trackers which look rather poor... – Surgical Coder Oct 14 '09 at 14:26
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Urban Turtle with Visual Studio Team System 2010 You will have all the great functionality of TFS for Agile development + a Real Scrum planning board and task board with the Turtle

KyleMit
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user399653
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    Read what Brian Harry, who is the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server, said about Urban Turtle: **"...awesome Scrum experience for TFS."** You can read Brian Harry's blog post at the following URL: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/01/05/urban-turtle-for-scrum-and-tfs.aspx – Mario Cardinal Feb 12 '11 at 21:31
  • Looks great but it is far from free. – corinnaerin Dec 06 '13 at 23:46
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Pivotal Tracker is great and uses User Stories and Iterative Development.

Brian Kelly
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We use Trac and it works for us pretty well. It has lots of plugins which helps you better customize it to your needs. Overall, a nice minimalistic, light-weight tool.

jamesaharvey
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  • Trac looks more like a Wiki than an Agile Project Management tool – PositiveGuy Oct 12 '09 at 02:04
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    It's definitely more than just Wiki. Where we get the most value out of it is with the Issue Tracking/Ticketing and Workflow. – jamesaharvey Oct 12 '09 at 02:17
  • Trac has absolutely no Project Management out of the box. – PositiveGuy Oct 12 '09 at 02:30
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    Neither does Redmine. The trick with all the bug management systems is that you use bugs/issues/enhancements and milestones/releases/whatever to manage your project. Most of them do not have resource management. Trac has what you said you wanted: "will handle bugs, tasks, etc. plus management in viewing iterations, timeline, etc..." – Adam Gent Sep 09 '10 at 11:28
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For software project management please consider:

Endeavour Software Project Management is an Open Source solution to manage the creation of large-scale enterprise systems in an iterative and incremental development process. It features support for Use Case management, Iterations, Project Plan, Change Requests, Defect Tracking, Test Cases, Tasks, Document management and many other process artifacts.

http://endeavour-mgmt.sourceforge.net

Ezequiel Cuellar
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How about iMeta Agility a Scrum Management Tool. It is a rich internet tool written in Silverlight. It is free! iMeta Agility is focused around simplicity and usability. The hosted version is designed to allow collaboration on distributed teams.

Importantly the team that are developing the product are delivering functionality based on community feedback. So you can influence the future development direction.

Clive Skipper
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Microsoft Team System. I saw a demo of it recently at a conference and was blown away by how awesome it is. Believe it does just about everything under the sun (version control, bug tracking, task allocation, time logging, etc.)

mike
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