Should developers pick Agile tools according to their personal preference?

[jennifer.dempsey_Appfire]

Hello- I'm a Certified Scrum Master and Product Marketing Manager at Appfire and I'm exploring the question, "Should developers pick Agile tools according to their personal preference?"

I'd love to hear your opinion on this topic and why or why not you think they should. Thanks in advance for sharing your experience and insights!

[Peter Babbington-Fowles · Accepted solution]

I think tool selection should always be based on the job at hand (what the tooling is going to do for you) and your budget (including training etc).

Personal preference can inform the selection - we all have our favourites, and these can help draw up a shortlist, but the selection itself should always be based on getting value for money and the tool's suitability for the task

[jennifer.dempsey_Appfire]

Thanks, Peter! I agree that value for the money and the suitability of a tool are important considerations.

[Syed Abdul Basit · Accepted solution]

Hi @jennifer.dempsey_Appfire

I think it depends on the agile team. Usually, in a software organization agile mindset is quite common and most of the stakeholders are familiar with it. However, in a non-IT-oriented organization, agile is a new thing and an easier way to adopt agile is to start with the Kanban framework. Secondly, it's up to the team which framework they adopt and start practicing it. An important aspect is that the agile team would follow the agile manifesto and principles, and the framework selection (Scrum, Kanban, etc.) would come later.

If the agile team understands the above part, then it would be easier to get their alignment on the agile tool. I used multiple tools in my project management experience, however, I found Jira covers most of the things for a beginner team to an advanced agile team because it gives holistic information about the project and one can easily integrate other communication and collaboration tools like slack, google suite, etc. Obviously, an enterprise or an SME-type organization can easily go for Jira. But for entrants like startups, it would be costly for them and usually, they opt for much cheaper tools to fulfill their day-to-day project management needs. 

[jennifer.dempsey_Appfire]

Thank you, Syed! I agree, those are important distinctions to keep in mind. 

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

The answer is: it depends.

What kind of tools are we talking about?

For example, if every developer or developer team choose their own Agile Management tool, some teams using Jira Software, others Taiga, others Miro boards, you could have a problem when you what do get global information and extract them for reports.

It is also a problem if we are talking about other tools, like CI/CD pipelines, because you will get a technology sprawl.

I think that there should be some governance with flexibility, to establish some mandatory and common tools, and be open to extend that tool portfolio based on a proven utility case.

Maybe using the same tool, every team could have different ‘ways of working’. Some can choose Scrum, others Kanban, others Dual Track Scrum, others Shape Up and so on.

But even if you see the State of DevOps report 2019, you will see that the most effective teams try to standardize as much as they can.

Developers languages and technologies should also be standardized as much as you can, except when you have an architecture design requirement for a specific solution (Ej. Big Data, BI, ML, event streaming, etc.).

All this will make you governance and management easier.

[jennifer.dempsey_Appfire]

Thanks, Ivan! "It depends" is a very honest answer. Autonomy can often seem to be at odds with standardization but you make an excellent point that there can still be different 'ways of working' for individuals within a team, even if all team members are using the same tool.