Scrum/Agile Tools: Quick Look at GreenHopper

August 18, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Full disclosure: On Agile 2008, I was asking Pyxis Technologies about the possible sponsorship of this site. It didn't proceed further but at some point I am going to get back to the topic.

Lately I discovered that since last time I paid close attention to Agile methods related tools they did improve much. On Agile 2008 I visited many if not all of the tool vendors booths and in the coming weeks we will probably publish a number of reviews. Before I left for the conference one of the AgileUkraine group members asked me to have a look at the GreenHopper software. This post is exactly a result of the quick look I was asked for. It is no in-depth review, just my impressions after the demo made on the conference and after the extensive interrogation of a Pyxis representative who demoed the tool for me.

What Greenhopper is all about

GreenHopper is a plugin for the popular issue tracker Jira. This plugin adds a visual interface that presents Jira issues in a form of drag'n'droppable index cards so welcome by the Agile community. Also it is capable of building many useful and not so useful graphs. Pricing depends on the chosen Jira version and at the moment ranges from 350 to 1150 Canadian dollars (about 220 to 750 euros), 1 year of support included.

Pros

• Usability
  Bear in mind that this is just a first impression report, but from all the modern Agile tools showcased on the conference I found GreenHopper to be the easiest to understand. I don't know how they managed to achieve that, but the tool just feels simple and I found many of its features intuitive to use. Not that other tools were extremely complex, it is just so that GreenHopper was even better.

• Drag and drop orientation
  I am not sure whether I should list it as a separate advantage, since all the modern tools support the card based views. Anyway, planning and task boards are there, you can prioritize things by dragging the cards around and cards themselves look like the real cards.

• Jira orientation.
  If you already use Jira for planning and tracking your development, installing a plugin can be a way easier than learning a new tool. GreenHopper stores everything right in the Jira artifacts and if you are unhappy with the tool, you can go back to Jira without loosing the data. As with any Jura issues you can add comments to cards, attach various discussion logs, files, display your own custom fields, etc., etc.

Cons

• Little support for flexible story splitting
  My favorite scenario for testing the tools goes along the lines of the following. Suppose we had a story Ship orders estimated at 13 points. When the team actually starts working on it, it suddenly realizes the complexity of dealing with the external providers and has to split the story into two "sub-stories" Ship to US and Ship internationally. Each of these sub-stories has estimates bigger, than the original story - let's say 20 and 40 points. As team realized it now, the original story was better to be referred as epic). A good tool should be able to split the original story, allow for moving one of the sub-stories into another iteration and when calculating burndowns take into account that in the past sprints the shipping  theme was worth 13 points, but in the ongoing ones these 13 points are replaced with 60 points. Well, GreenHopper doesn't support this kind of scenario out of the box. It is good, when dealing with just stories and tasks, but not really optimized for the iterative story breakdown.
• No velocity chart out of the box
  Again, bear in mind that these are just my first impressions. I did not find any good velocity chart out of the box. It is not too complex to plot number of story points DONE per sprit using the value chart, but you have to actually do it and, well, it is not called a velocity chart
• Jira orientation
  If you don't use Jira yet, having to install yet another tool just for GreenHopper might be an overkill and too big bet on the success of a tool. I wouldn't like to go into deep details in just a first glace report, but there are many subtle pros and cons coming from being tied to Jira. If you use Jira already, you probably figured out already how to cope with the restrictions, but if you aren't using Jira yet, you might find them too limiting.

Short summary. Kind of

If you have a relatively small team and project, are already used to Jira, ready to put  bit of effort into customization, can live without splitting the epics into smaller and smaller sub-stories, then this tool is for you and you will probably be pleased by a simple and usable interface. If you are not using Jira and value the flexibility of splitting stories much, than I'd have closer look at another tools before jumping to the GreenHopper wagon.

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