An important success factor for any team is having all project information available when it's needed. This primarily includes the Product Backlog as well as any project documents like lists and diagrams. Chingu doesn't require that a specific tool be used to manage these. Only that they be available to eveyone on a team.
In all cases Chingu teams have the freedom to select any free tool or service they agree on.
Some project documents may be maintained in a specialized service website. For example, wireframes may be maintained on the Figma website if Figma is the design tool chosen by the team.
Similarly, other documents like team lists, text files, spreadsheets, and images not referenced by the application code may be referenced in any document storage service agreed on by the team. For example, Google Drive or Dropbox to name two.
Product Backlogs are best maintained in services specifically designed for this purpose. You should take the following into consideration when looking for a suitable tool:
- Does it allow both a title and a description to be assigned to each Product Backlog Item (PBI)?
- Does it use Markdown or rich text for formatting of text?
- Does it support a board view of the epics, user stories, and tasks that make up the backlog?
- Does it allow statuses to be assigned to PBI's (e.g. backlog, sprint backlog, in progress, in testing, blockers, completed) to organize the board into swimlanes.
- Are statuses configurable?
- Does it allow dependencies to be mapped?
- Does it allow priorities to be assigned to PBI's?
- Does it maintain a log of changes and who made them?
- Does it include GitHub integration?
These are just a few things to consider and your team may think of others?
A few Product Backlog tools Chingus have successfully used in Voyages include the following:
| Product Backlog Tool | Considerations |
|---|---|
| Clickup | - Extensive features - High learning curve - Some features limited in free tier |
| GitHub Projects | - Basic features - Low learning curve - Easily accessible from team repo |
| Jira | - Popular with many companies - High learning curve |
| Miro | - Intermediate features - Low learning curve |
| Taiga | - Intermediate features -Low learning curve |
| Trello | - Basic features - Low learning curve |