Sprintometer for Windows

Sprintometer is a free project management tool optimized for the Scrum methodology. Though sometimes spelled with all caps, SCRUM, it's not an acronym; it's a term taken from rugby football and refers here to the holistic, overlapping, all-at-once approach often used in agile software development. Participants call their intensive, two- to four-week projects "sprints." Sprintometer helps you time your sprints. It has an Office-style layout, exports to Excel, supports XML, reports on Agile parameters, and tracks development and testing separately. It also offers password protection and HTTPS server connections for security. And it's completely portable, requiring no installation to run.

You can run Sprintometer's extracted executable from just about anywhere, including a USB drive. Everything you need is right on the Sprintometer toolbar, clearly labeled and logically grouped under General, Export, Local File, Remote Server, Budget Info, Spreadsheet Filters, and View. We clicked New under Local File, calling up the Project Type wizard, which asked us to choose an Agile project type, XP (extreme programming), or Scrum. You can't change project types once a project has been created. We selected Scrum, and Sprintometer presented a cleanly configured, tabbed tool sheet. On the General tab, we entered a project name, Estimation Units, and Work Types, easily adding a custom task in the process. The Resources & Budgets tab contained the nub of a spreadsheet, while the Server Project Users tab let us add users to our server via a log-on dialog. This tab is where you'd authorize team members to access the project server, which is configured via the Remote Server section of the toolbar. Here we could set up and save our server settings, connections, and log-on data. From our project name in the navigation tree view, we were able to add Sprints, which track projects via a workbook with eight tabs of charts, graphs, and reports, including Scope Chart, Track Chart, 3D Burn Down, and Story Readiness Report.

We were impressed with all Sprintometer has to offer, especially for a free project management tool. The XP tool seems just as capable as the Scrum section. While optimized for software development, Sprintometer can be used for any project using Agile methodologies.