Scrum Management Tool Poll Results: Moving Away From Cards?

The poll on Scrum / Agile tools usage was the most popular Scrum Breakfast poll to date — 100 responses, of which 63 were using a dedicated agile project management tool. A market leader seems to be emerging in the agile project management space. I’ve finally gotten a chance to compare the results of this Poll with those of the Scrumdevelopment poll on the same subject from December 2006. The results indicate significant changes in what tools agile teams are using to manage their work. I wanted the results to be comparable with the Scrumdevelopment poll, so respondants could only pick one tool. So even though they might use several tools, they had to choose which one was the most important.

The data indicates a significant shift towards dedicated agile project management software (from 7 to 63%), away from Spreadsheets ( down 38% to 9%) and Wiki &Other/Homegrown tools (together down from 33% to 6%), and to a lesser extent cards (down from 36 to 18%). Open Source solutions and traditional project management software(with 4% of the respondants) do not appear to play a significant role in this market. Dominant Player? Under the commercial suppliers, VersionOne was the most top ranked response (54% of those voting for a commercial tool), followed by ScrumWorks at 17%, and TargetProcess and Scrum for Team System (8% each).

The question was raised in the comments whether one manufacturer might have orchestrated a high response rate. It’s hard to know for sure, but I don’t think so. Three reasons:

• Representative of two suppliers other than the winner left comments on the blog while the poll was running and so were aware of the results as they developed. If they had wanted to orchestrate a get-out-the-vote campaign, they could have (and maybe they did!).
• I did put out a get-out-the-vote reminder on the scrumdevelopment list. It produced little if any effect.
• As I watched the voting progress, the development seemed organic: the pattern was established early and subsequent voting did not change the percentages much.

It will be interesting to see how these results compare with VersionOne’s study, which will be published next month.

P.S. For those of you who want the details: the poll data can be downloaded as an ODF spreadsheet.
 
[Update: July 7: I have published a Directory of Scrum Management Tools with links to all the suppliers]