Last week on December 1st Aldon released the Aldon Agile Manager and InfoQ spoke with Dan Magid, Chief Product Strategist of Aldon, about this new product. Agile Manager is a free agile project management tool meant to provide better planning, prioritization and collaboration. This first release of the community built tool focuses on backlog management and provides a rich web based interface that allows product managers to control all of their user stories in one place.
In harmony with their commitment to building Aldon Agile Manager with community support, Aldon has published their backlog to the web. Agile Manager currently supports Internet Explorer and Firefox and Aldon intends to support Chrome and Safari in upcoming releases. Additionally, they currently support Redhat 5 and CentOS 5 on the server side and will support Windows Server in early 2011.
Kelly Waters, agilista extraordinaire, received an early preview of an upcoming release of Aldon Agile Manger and had this to say:
They intend to release new versions of the product every 3-4 months and they've got some great ideas. I particularly liked the way they intend to allow you to visually sort user stories into columns based on their Fibonacci size. They also showed me a great prototype for how they plan to allow you to sort user stories into priority order, again in a very visual way.
Aldon Agile Manager will support Scrum, Kanban, CP and hybrid agile methodologies. The intention is to support the heart of the agile process which is management of the backlog such as prioritization, sizing, assignment to iterations and assignment to releases. The target users are Project Managers, Product Owners and Scrum/Kanban teams. As users track the status of backlog items, Agile Manager is meant to help them manage the flow of tasks and be provided with an overall view of where they are in specific stages.
The first release includes the following features:
- Product & Release Backlog Management: Backlog screens represent the high-level status of either the product or release backlog, where users prioritize, view, rank, submit feature requests, enhancement requests, and bug fixes.
- Inline editing: Quick editing of specific items in the backlog allows users to make fast changes without going to a separate screen to perform edit functions.
- Dynamic sorting: Sort and re-sort the backlog so the highest priority stories are on top, or the most current release is displayed first.
- Mass edit or delete: Easily update the backlog by performing mass edits or deletes to multiple stories at once.
- Detailed view of stories: View, add, or modify the details of each story—status, process status, product, release, story type, title, priority, description, category, and points.
- Simultaneous Multiple Release Planning: Users can create releases from the product backlog and move stories to the designated release. Users can plan multiple releases in advance.
- Easy story assignment: Users can move stories between releases or back into the backlog with a click of the mouse.
Aldon uses Agile Manager in-house every day and will release new versions on a 3 month basis or more frequently as determined by the community. In true agile spirit, code is production ready at the end of each iteration and will be made publically available immediately. Interested parties may acquire Aldon Agile Manager as a free download.