Sao Paulo, May, … I would like some suggestions from you, if you would recommend any kind of tool in order to stimating, tracking our stories and bugs, and planning our sprint. I know that there are some of them, mainly at sourceforge.net, but I would like a recommendation, If you could.

Please, use a task board and post its. At least for 3 Sprints. Then ask the team, if they want something else.

Never!!!! use a electronic tool in the Sprint Planning Meetings. It is too slow. Maybe we do have in the future electronic post-its ;) But till then. Do not do it!

If you want to manage distributed Teams: Use a task board and try web-cams. If this is not sufficient – there are nice tools, but I can not really recommend one, as I do not know your special needs.

One is better in collaboration, one is better in creating reports and tracking. I have seen a very nice new open source tool that was done by C.E.S.A.R. on the CMMI workshop in Recife two weeks ago. The name is FireScrum. (http://www.firescrum.com/).

It is still in progress and maybe you want to spent your time with changing this tool according to your needs rather than configuring a costly state of the art Scrum Tool. Well – they are very good – but most teams do not need them.

Distributed Teams needs first communication, communication, and communication.

See also: Product Backlog Templates