An Agile / Scrum Project Management Tool

What started as a tool to support our service business has become our core business now. Here is how we got started…

Like many, we started with good old Excel spreadsheet and emails for keeping track of our stories/feature requests, bugs, iterations (sprints), burndown charts, and times. However, in remote delivery environment, it soon became a major headache. We looked for a suitable agile project management and collaboration tool at a reasonable price. We selected “Version One” in 2006. Although it provided a lot of flexibility, but it took us a good couple months to learn how to use it. When we asked our clients to start using it, they also found it difficult to learn. So, we looked for another tool that is simple to use. And we found one called “Basecamp.” I am sure many of you are using it. We all including our clients picked up the tool in no time. Life became a little easier. However, since it was not designed for Scrum, we had to improvise how to adapt it for Scrum. One glaring issue though still remained with Basecamp. Its time tracking and estimation mechanism was not suitable for Scrum and so we had to continue to use Version One.  Also using two tools for managing projects became a hassle. So, we finally decided to build something that will make our life simple for forever. ScrumPad was born.

We first tried to extend Basecamp to add missing features. Soon we realized that there is a natural impedance mismatch between Basecamp project management model and Agile / Scrum project management model.  Also having project data live across two independent services and legal & operational issues that could potentially arise from that, the benefit of extending Basecamp does not make it worth while to take on the risks for both our clients and us.  So, we discarded the work of extending Basecamp and restarted from scratch. The rest is history.