The Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools help keep our scrum teams moving in the right direction. It gives Sr. Executives visibility into the progress of our digital transformation efforts. It provides information to our program manager to create the necessary artifacts to justify continued funding of our initiatives. It also supports the SAFe framework, along with some others. And the Atlassian Jira Align (formerly AgileCraft) tools provide integration to other tools that we use in our portfolio.
I don't know anything about pricing, but if Taskworld were an inexpensive choice I would say it works fairly well for small to mid-sized companies with complex workflows. It's great for managing tasks that move through multiple-stage pipelines that aren't necessarily linear. However, depending on the price it's not worth the spend for all the technical difficulties it brought. Our company was relatively small (60 employees) and yet we constantly faced "server issues" and bugs and even software-wide crashes that seriously impacted our ability to do business. If you choose to go with Taskworld, be sure you have a solid disaster-management plan in place just in case, because chances are you'll experience bugs on a weekly basis
Effective Sprint planning : Sprint planning can be done using Planning Poker in AgileCraft by clicking Team > Manage > Other > Estimation Games very effectively for distributed teams.
Team Capacity Allocation Report: After tasks are created at team or program level, the report from AgileCraft cab be pulled and can be verified that no team member is under or over allocated. A report can be generated by navigating to Team > Manage > Assign Tasks.
Effective Requirement trace-ability: To maintain requirements trace-ability follow the steps below:
Upload test cases against the story/requirement. once uploaded test cases will be visible under that story
Execute Test cases in AgileCraft and mark them as Pass/Fail based on the actual outcome
Based on test results, The acceptance criterion's can be marked as “Pass” or “Fail” & if marked failed corresponding defect can be logged & can be attached with the story
So against each story we can easily see whether all test cases been executed or not & which acceptance criterion's are failed & how many defects are in open or close state.
Daily Scrum: In AgileCraft, the option to run a daily stand-up is available from Team > Manage > Daily Standups. Selecting the sprint number opens the daily stand-up meeting window in which each team member's tasks are visible and hours can be burned against them. Conduct Scrum meetings in AgileCraft, and burn each associate hour against the tasks created during the meeting. The burn-down chart can be generated & viewed during the stand-up to check whether the team is on track.
Task Management - It's super easy to track progress on Taskworld. If your team keeps up with it, you'll never wonder where in the project someone is, because it's marked.
Project checklists - Having these to organize out smaller portions of the tasks makes everything so much easier and helps keep track of progress.
The initial ticket creation screen lacks some important features, such as assigning "point values" (a measure of effort needed for the ticket).
The browser needs to be manually refreshed to see new tickets, which can make things confusing when several people in a meeting are simultaneously creating tickets.
The interface on some smaller portions of the software are sometimes difficult to understand.
Taskworld crashed ALL THE TIME. It was so frustrating. You'd notice certain functions not working (like adding an additional location or reassigning a task) and then the whole thing would go down. We lost at least 3 individual business days due to Taskworld acting up.
We often requested features and bug fixes that took forever to be resolved. Taskworld staff was responsive, but issues took too long to resolve. As a small example, the GIF functionality of chat and task communication was down for weeks with no explanation.
Small glitches were frequent and obnoxious. We had to clear caches all the time in hopes that we'd be able to use Taskworld the way it was intended. There were many times employees didn't get notified of their "@ mentions" or weren't seeing notifications at all. It was a nightmare of death by a thousand cuts.
Most of the things are easily manageable except certain things that are hidden and you need to ask teammates who are aware of how they can link attachements in the comment section and so on.
Overall support from Jira team is good. It comes at an additional price but it is very efficient. There are no long wait times, you get a dedicated team to look into your issues. The support is available throughout the year and they keep a record of your issues. Overall we are very satisfied with the support they have provided us over the years, it has been very effective for the price that we pay.
I can't say too much about the support we've gotten from Taskworld, because we haven't needed it. There haven't been any issues we've to have to reach out about because it works too well. Given the quality of the application, I'm sure the quality of the support follows.
Microsoft Azure Devops won't have the major functionality of software management like Jira. The customization provided by Jira is having a cutting edge over any project management tool. Adds-on and Plugins feature in the Jira Tool make it as perfect as desired task management tool for any company. One of the best Agile based Project Management Tools.
We used Basecamp very briefly before switching over to Taskworld. Basecamp wasn't nearly as dynamic as Taskworld and served more as a static archive than an active workflow software.
It has positively impacted our tech teams, allowing them to better organize the tasks and items they are working on and has greatly improved their ability to communicate & review these tasks with other teams.
I believe it negatively impacted other departments as lengthy training was required by many associates to attempt using the tool, only to find out it didn't meet our needs, therefore much time was wasted.
