As some people may already know, Wazi published a comparison of Open Source Agile Project Management tools two months ago, including IceScrum.

The comparison is very elaborate,  and shows that the author spent time for defining criteria and using the four products. IceScrum roughly got a good appreciation.

In this post, I give some complements for the IceScrum evaluation. First, the release used for testing was R2#13. It’s not the last one. Last release is R2#14, coming with a bunch of improvements.

About the iteration burndown chart, the criticism is justified: IceScrum burndown ends the current day. For instance if it’s the 4th day of a sprint of two weeks, burndown will only show the 4 past days, instead of putting it in a 14 days timebox. This enhancement request already appears in the IceScrum backlog.

About the Portfolio planning, that’s true that IceScrum only shows one product. There would be a progress to show several projects in a dashboard, for enterprises developing several products with IceScrum.

The red cross in Story themes is the result of an incomprehension. In older releases, IceScrum used the theme concept. The feature is already present in the tool, with a new name: feature. It’s a deliberate choice for simplifying used vocabulary. A user can associate a story to a feature (theme) by dragging a feature from the minimized view and dropping it on a story (then the story takes the feature color).

The cross for Team of users reflects the lack of team concept in IceScrum. An explicit team was required in previous releases but this was harmful to give a name. Now the team is merely the list of team members. A team name would be useful for situations in which a team would participate to several product developements. We are going to study this capability.

We don’t understand why there is a red cross in Reports (the author probably didn’t find the access to reports). IceScrum produces 10 graphical reports (6 from Roadmap, 2 from Release Plan, 1 from Sprint Backlog, 1 from Build). Furthermore these reports are included in the PDF that can be generated with the Project selective export. An example is the Velocity chart (by story type) that illustrates this post.

About Integation & API, a  Mylyn connector for Eclipse is available and we continue to work for improving integration.

Other complements:

• the installation guide in english existed, but was only available on the forum. Now you can get it from the « about installation » category on the website,
• usability is not always intuitive, but a  guide available on IceScrum site allow to know features accessible by right clicking,
• IceScrum allows to work on large product backlogs with more 100 stories, with pagination and prioritization facilities.