Ontic Oren

What should I build? And who says so? When do they need it? Will we be able to deliver?I’m working with my team and engineers every day to answer these. Although tools will never make up for a terrible process, a good tool can also make things go much much smoother. For 2 years, I’ve been using Accept 360 for requirement tracking. My wife is leading up an evaluation at her company right now, which sparked some more investigation on my part.To look at all the players out there, you need to break the SW development process down. I’d say there are three phases, irrespective of development methodolgy. Regardless if you’re a Scrumer, a XP developer, or a plain old waterfall, it seems like you always have three tasks:

1. CRM/Customer interface. Collect data from customer, define and justify your requirements with data. This is almost always driven by email, personal interaction, meetings, notes. The tool is here to help the product manager collect their thoughts, organize the data, collaborate with other marketing people, and feed the status back to the field and customer. Very focused on traceability - show me who is asking for what, when and how. Very CRM like.
2. Project Management. Manage the development, what is in what release. Know when and what you’ll have. A very blury line often between product management, engineering, and gobs of other people. Focus on the deliverables, the specifications, and getting releases out. Heavily used during development by all involved.
3. Release management. Bugs on released products, feedback into step 1. Close the loop. Collect the feedback from users, community, post-release QA. Feed back in to Phase 1 and continue ahead. I see this as a combination of bug database and Wiki.

I looked at bunch of tools. All except featureplan I’ve looked at in the past month - featureplan I last looked at over a year ago, so much may have changed.

• Accept 360
  • Phase 1 Focused
  • Web UI, Slowest interaction, though still acceptable
  • Very focused on the requirements gathering phase. Very strong relationship definition.
  • Recreating the CRM - if you use anything else gets frustrating to enter in data duplication.
  • Methodology agnostic. Neither helps nor hurts with Scrum.
  • Weak Phase 2. Not worth using IMO. Too complex, can’t actual inteagrate. Very heavy project management overhead.
  • Seems big-company centric. Doesn’t feel “cool”
  • Doesn’t publish pricing, but it’s >$1000/user/year.
• Rally Software
  • Phase 2 focused. Plugins with others to satisfy phase 1 and 3.
  • Medium-complex UI. Very usable, fast.
  • All about Agile/Scrum. Uses terminology, flows that force you to use agile.
  • Focused on what they can do - doesn’t try to solve it all
  • Best integration - subversion, eclipse, Visual studio, jira, salesforce, etc.
  • Super cool wiki/community integration with end-to-end salesforce tracking as well.
  • $35/user/month or $420/user/year. Salesforce integration extra.
• FogBugz
  • Phase 2 & 3 focus
  • No methodology implied, do whatever you want.
  • Integrated wiki appears weak - separate from reset of product. Would personally use mediawiki instead.
  • Very slick UI, very fast, VERY easy to use.
  • $25/user/month
• VersionOne
  • Waiting to get a demo account still. Demerits to them. Who requires talking on the phone in this day and age to get a demo account?
  • $30/user/month
• Feature Plan
  • Phase 1 only, but crushes it.
  • Deep requirements planning. Integrates with Rally.
  • Development methodology agnostic.
  • Only windows only client (they’ve got a web UI, didn’t exist when I looked last)
  • All about pragmatic marketing (but then, I am too.
  • Darn expensive as I recall.
• Trac
  • Phase 2 and 3.
  • The dark horse in this group - open source, PITA to install
  • Scrum plugins to make project management in Scrum very reasonable.
  • Good integrated Wiki features
  • Possibly better as a project tracking than a product - need investigation but initial feeling is this works GREAT for open source projects, but may run into issues with wiki and others for real product release lifecycle (i.e. permissions on documentation).
  • “free”

Rally really impressed me. I used it 18 months ago, and was underwhelmed, now it seems like a great tool. I especially like the integration - Salesforce for your CRM (and bugs even), take continuous integration data, and have it all useful from one tool. It’s probably a high investment strategy, but I could see starting small, just trying it out, and growing to make it a core part of the platform.Alternatively, fogbugz looks like a great choice. It’s less of the uber-tool, and more focused on the development. For Scrum management, I’d suggest using good old paper (burn down, planning, etc).The data geek in me says go for Rally. KISS says Fogbugz and paper.