Monday, November 22, 2010

Agile Tools That Just Work

Here are some nice tools that I use and generally make life easier in an agile world.

Scrumy

http://www.scrumy.com
Free kanban board for managing projects (and life).

WebSequenceDiagrams

http://www.websequencediagrams.com/
Quick way to create sequence diagrams and the input is text meaning its easy to share with other that don't have tools like Visio or EA etc. I actually prefer this to visio and our scrum team used it a lot in our last delivery.

SpecFlow

http://specflow.org/
I like Fitnesse but there is too much friction (not a lot, but enough) in terms of the development cycle (e.g. its odd source control management). SpecFlow is close enough to cucumber for me (in the .Net world) and does not rely on Ruby to be installed. Ruby installs on windows are still a complete PITA as far as I'm concerned and I'll generally do anything to avoid it. SpecFlow also runs with your existing (x/n/mb)unit testing tool of choice. I must say I didn't like this tool at first but having come back to it, either the experience is cleaner or I have opened up a bit more.

Gist

https://gist.github.com/
Like Pastie but associated to my GitHub account. I'm starting to use it more and more to do brain dumps of simple code snippets (e.g. PowerShell functions etc) that can be handy to reuse, but not really worth its own repo.

If I was running an external commercial project (e.g. at home) I would seriously consider the use of LowDown. It fits my development style very well without the clutter and bollocks associated with other ALM/project management tools. Git integration makes it very interesting too.