It didn’t happen overnight.  Red Hat is a big consumer of Bugzilla and in the beginning of our project, we agreed that rather than adopt the existing tool-du-jour (XPlanner) in addition to Bugzilla, we’d stick with what we knew well and build a process around that.

It worked, sorta, but we quickly became hindered by Bugzilla’s lack of anything resembling a workflow. We’d file user stories as bugs but since the tool is so cumbersome to use, we’d rarely task them out properly.  Some things would slip and other things would take scrum team members by surprise.  I’m no fan of Bugzilla, but in Mozilla’s defense, they aren’t really trying to do agile.

We decided as a team to adopt Rally since we already had some seats set aside for it.  I’m happy to report that thus far (half a sprint in), we’re pretty pleased.  It steps up in all the places Bugzilla falls over:

• Dead simple creation of tasks per story
• Resource management
• Implicit grouping of tasks under a story such that hours/progress are aggregated meaningfully
• Quick in-place editing (BZ languishes in web 1.0)
• Built-in workflow & reporting designed for agile development
• Useful dashboard that displays rich information about the current sprint (tasks, defects, blockers, burndown)

We’re still deciding what to do with our large Bugzilla backlog, but it turns out there may be a plugin we can use.  If we go that route, I hope to have time to blog about it in a future posting.

Sure we do the best we can with JIRA (a fantastic traditional bug tracker) and MS Project (a not-so-fantastic project management tool), but there doesn’t seem to be a good selection of tools to mimick an agile team.

I want creamy visual objects that represent features which can be moved between developers.  I want a view of each developer’s workload for the next week, month and year.  I want to know in 10sec what’s going out when, and which tasks are the limiting factor.

The closest thing I’ve found is VersionOne, and I haven’t had a chance to fully evaluate it yet.  If anyone has any clues, I’m all ears.