Kunagi

I've used this software on and off various projects for three years.

Kunagi is a functional tool that organizes your sprints, product backlog, sprint backlog, tasks, release planning etc. Kunagi provides all the required core features to completely implement and run a Scrum team's day to day tasks.

All Sprint ceremonies are supported, including distributed planning poker. The Scrum board ("whiteboard") is intuitive and easy to use. I consider it fully functional and complete.

This software stands out from others because it is able to be hosted locally as opposed to Software As A Service solutions. As far as I can find it's one of the most complete free self-hosted solutions (if not the most complete).

I would negatively rate this software on the following items:

Design - The style and design of the user interface is dated and not very pretty. It's designed to be a functional tool from the start.

Usability - I would describe the user interface as clunky. You click inside fields to edit them and click outside them to save the data. There are other unintuitive conventions, for example, if you bid a story, pulled it into the sprint, then kicked it from the sprint, you have to re-confirm the estimation on that story before you are given the option to pull the story into the sprint again. There is a colored bar on each story which represents total vs. remaining hours, and it wasn't immediately clear what its purpose was until you hover over the bar. The clunkiness is less of an issue with experience.

Bugs - We've run into many bugs/errors in using the software for what I would consider normal use cases. However, they are fixed reasonably quickly, and the Kunagi team is responsive if you submit issues.

Stability - Kunagi tends to need a restart every so often. Disclaimer: I do not run it in a proper production environment, so stability may be negatively affected in my particular case. YMMV.

Architecture/Administration - Data storage is not handled using a typical relational SQL database. Data is serialized into entity XML files and stored on the filesystem. This makes backups less trivial than slipping a new database into an already established SQL backup regimen. This product was developed in Java to run under Apache Tomcat, the administration of these types of servers is a skillset which I find to be increasingly rare. You can also run it using a simple GUI application for development applications.

Release 0.15

The main new (and as always, very exciting) feature we were able to ship with release 0.15 is opening all links and expanding all entities in a new tab / window.

We have also reworked the user list to be way cooler than before. For example, it now displays what people are viewing and whether they are idle.

Read more: http://kunagi.org/blg8.html

Release 0.14 - We have been working on a lot of small stuff this Sprint and are proud to present our longest release notes yet. The plans for next Sprint are similar, so expect another one of those next month. http://kunagi.org/blg7.html