We currently enjoy doing Scrum planning using Pivotaltracker as we’re really pleased with its ability to not only plan stories but keep track of status and communicate about them. It works as a charm, updates real-time when other users update story status or ordering. Even better: it currently still is for free!

Some improvements could be made although (we quickly get spoiled, don’t we?):

• Improved access control: whilst you can assign a member view-only rights, there is no way to distinct a business owner (who should keep track of the backlog) from the scrum team.
• Tracking actual hours spent: besides estimating, we need to keep track of the hours that actually were invested in a story (for retrospective and/or billing). Pivotaltracker currently doesn’t support this.

Today we ran into Scrum’d, a new app from Atlantic Dominion Solutions. This tool seems to fulfil both needs, so we’re clearly interested to know if it’s worth switching to this tool. We’ll be evaluating it in the upcoming months but please share any experience you may have with these (or other) tools you think are worth considering.