A completely free agile software process tool
I know slightly close questions have been asked before but this question is a bit different.
We are a start-up company with a very limited budget and we are looking for a completely free Agile software development process tool without any limitation on the number of users. We don't want to have a limitation for the number of users because there could be a lot of people who would do small tasks for us and if they pass the number of user limit all of a sudden we'll have to pay a lot of money for the tool monthly.
It would be very useful if it could support:
- Kanban board
- Task hierarchy (so that you can define cards within cards)
- Hosting the tool online (not download)
- Commenting system
- Different roles
- Swimlanes
I have checked a lot of those tools here:
http://agilescout.com/best-agile-scrum-tools/
but I didn't find any that is absolutely free for unlimited users. Some of them also don't have a Kanban board. I checked Agilefant but its online version is going to be paid from 2014. I also checked Stackoverflow for this but none of the questions were targeting "completely free tools".
Your help will be greatly appreciated.
Answer
Trello.com Trello is free for unlimited users. Period.
You almost definitely don't need "Sub-cards". Use the checklists instead, or if you REALLY need sub-cards, don't have a parent sub-card. Just name the tickets something like "Epic - Story A" or "Story - task Z" or whatever.
Another idea is to create two boards (did I mention you can have unlimited boards for free too?). One for your epics and one for your stories. Call one your product management board and the other your sprint board, or whatever you like.
I'm not sure what you need different roles for - but, people aren't crazy - they know their job. As a startup if you already have problems getting people to not do crazy things (Where you need to restrict their permissions) you have much much bigger issues.
The point is that you need a SMALL tool to help you track stuff. Not a super rigid tool that makes you work in a super specific way. As a new (I assume?) startup, you should let your process grow into a tool. Don't beef up your process to fit a tool.