JIRA vs ? - For large datawarehouse projects
Hello,
I’m not a scrum master or even very trained in Agile. I appreciate your patience and assistance on this question:
I’m at a large company’s datawarehouse department and we have taken agile on board, with minimal training. We have some business people who are writing up stories for large projects, which is a good first step (Story Set 1). According to our scrum master we are going to take their stories and work together to enhance them into a set of unambiguous stories with clear acceptance criteria (Story Set 2). However this is a large project with many different pieces of code across multiple technologies, so those stories are broken into a third set of stories that are applicable to each technology – for instance to provide the Salesforce report we need stories covering the various steps needed to get the data loaded first (Story Set 3).
I’m told JIRA is a good choice – but it doesn’t look very slick or suited to such large projects. Our JIRA person doesn’t know how to maintain a hierarchy between the 3 sets of stories and he is more familiar with agile for use in webpages (smaller scale by far!)
Apparently JIRA is a defect tracker that has been converted for Agile. This suggests that JIRA is not the right tool.
There must be better tools than JIRA out there if so many companies are doing agile?
My Scrum Master says there are but that they cost £100,000’s…
People on this forum talk about using spreadsheets to show this, but if we are using JIRA, it seems silly to have a hierarchy in JIRA and other information in spreadsheets…
Are there other people out there using Agile for Large Datewarehouse projects? What tools do you use? How do you handle the multiple levels of stories? (or relating stories to EPIC's?)
Thanks,
Matt
Correction - that second last paragraph should read:
People on this forum talk about using spreadsheets to show this, but if we are using JIRA, it seems silly to have a hierarchy in spreadsheets and only some stories in JIRA...
There are many tools out there that are free, nearly free, or cheap and some of them are pretty good. My first choice is http://tfs.visualstudio.com for both Java and .NET work because of the integration and tooling to support agile teams. Its not just backlogs but feedback, and Test management, and source code, and automated build... all of which a good ALM tool supply's.
If you don't like VSO you can search for and find many agile planning boards online.
I see that VSO allows me to define my own levels in addition to their defaults of Themes->Epics->Features->Stories
Genius - thank you :) I'll keep reading about it further
We use two across the organization, some prefer Hansoft products , some prefer JIRA Atlassian products.
Pros and cons to both.
Why not evaluate all the above and get feedback from the teams at the Retrospective?
The teams have to be comfortable using them and the tool must meet their requirements.
http://www.hansoft.com/support/downloads/
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/try/
http://tfs.visualstudio.com
If you're still looking looking, you may also find real user reviews for all the major agile ALM tools on IT Central Station to be helpful.
As an example, users interested in JIRA alternatives also read reviews for CA Agile Centr al. You can see a direct comparison between the two solutions from IT Central Station users here.