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The paper aims to present a comparative analysis between 2 selected agile software tools: Atlassian Jira and Microsoft Team Foundation Server. In the next sections, we will present the methods of our study, expose the analysis of results, make a few discussions on the subject and draw our conclusions. The paper highlights the similarities and differences between these tools with respect to some identified functional requirements. The study will be done in two phases: (1) identification of the key functional requirements for agile management tools, and (2) a comparative analysis of the selected 2 tools. The study has shown that the identified key functional requirements that belong to the groups User stories and epics management, high-level release planning and low-level release planning have been mostly well covered by the examined tools. However, not all the basic functionalities are currently fully covered by some tools. The need for acceptance testing support has been recognized and efforts are being in this direction, although the current state is not satisfactory. User role modeling and personas support has not been covered entirely.
Keywords: Agile Methods, Agile Software Tools, User Story Management, Software Support, Atlassian Jira, Team Foundation Server, Project Management, Team Build, Process Tracking, Burndown Chart
1 Introduction and Literature Review
Modern organizations depend on software and software systems in many ways. Business processes are often implemented in a digital flow and without software to support it, even small companies would experience problems. For most companies, the business has changed and is still changing at rapid pace. The development of software has changed as well. Software requirements tend to evolve quickly and become outdated. Traditional project management techniques and especially traditional SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) methods (i.e. waterfall, "V" or incremental methods) cannot cope with that any more. Nowadays many organizations have large development teams working on software to support the business. Many times these teams are spread globally. This poses many potential problems, such as collaboration issues, source code maintenance, requirements management and so on. Without processes to support modern software development, business will likely suffer. This explains why agile methods have become more and more adopted lately [1].
Agile methods have emerged as a reaction to traditional approaches in software engineering known as documentation-driven and...