Currently our team uses JIRA to manage our agile projects. JIRA works alright but has two major limitations for us.
Our goal is to have a backlog of stories/cards, and be able to organize them on multiple public and private boards. For instance, we would have a "Features" board that public users could watch to see when features are being worked on, and when they are done. We would also have Public Roadmap, and a private roadmap. The goal is to be more transparent with our customers, and to better organize tasks that could exist on multiple boards simultaniously.
In JIRA:
- From what I can tell, it is impossible to share stories between multiple boards (We need this)
- We can't make a public facing board (To share roadmap and features with our clients).
So we started to look at Trello like tools, including Trello, KanTree, and PinTask. However, each of them had a feature we needed that the others didn't.
In Trello and KanTree, you can have public boards, but you can't easily share a card on more than one board. KanTree has a great feature where a card can have it's own board (like an epic). In PinTask you can share cards through "mirroring" but other than that it doesn't have the other features we need.
And to top it all off, Trello like tools are not great for managing a backlog just because the UI is so simplified it makes it hard to parse long lists of stories.
So, where does this all bring us? Well, we feel to best manage our process, as well as provide our customers the most up to date information on our product development process we need a tool that supports the following:
- Ability to manage a backlog of stories that is not tied to a Scrum Board.
- The ability to have stories exist on multiple boards (Go through multiple workflows)
- The ability for us to allow some boards to be public, so customers can track progress on valuable features
- Nice to have: Good support for sub-tasks on stories or the ability to organize this nicely as an epic.
I have spent a few weeks now trying to find the best way to do this with no luck. I am hoping more people with experience with a variety of tools can offer some advice.
Thanks!