Irie, Inc.

As mentioned in the first installment of this series, as the number of items to be managed grows, so does the need to manage them together as groups. A story-planning workshop may produce hundreds of story cards. If you have created story cards from the perspective of all of the different stakeholders, you may have a half-dozen story cards or more, all for one tiny little feature. Naturally, it only makes sense for these to be grouped together. But this one tiny feature may be part of a larger feature set. Capturing this relationship also makes sense.

In the 3×5 card world, you might paper-clip some together, binder-clip groups of paper-clipped groups together, you might place some groups physically near one another on purpose, or in clusters or groups withing confined areas of the desk or wall or floor. You may draw boundary lines in tape, and put stories or groups into one boundary or another. The Analog method, which all tools are meant to emulate, allows you at least three or four different grouping levels, possibly more if you get creative.

Some of the tools let you do as many levels of grouping as you like. Others do not. Some let you browse them hierarchically, others do not. Let’s take a look.

Analog (3×5 card) Method
Paper-clips, Binder-Clips, marked or defined areas, clusters within areas.
Usability: Medium Downside: hard to get the big picture without taking extra steps like summary cards or labels, and there is no (easy) search mechanism, hard to ‘browse’ the details if they are in piles or clipped together.

Ideal Digital Tool
Stories can be put into an effectively infinite level of nested groupings. Can expand/collapse groupings as needed to see as much or as little as you want.
Usability: High

Rally
Allows at least 5 levels of grouping, there is probably no practical limit. Can expand/collapse groupings as needed to see as much or as little as you want.
Usability: High Downside: difficulty managing the tree

VersionOne
Allows at least 5 levels of grouping, there is probably no practical limit.
Usability: Medium-High Downside: Can’t browse the hierarchy and look at the stories that are assigned to each grouping. Can filter by feature group, and display all stories at that level or lower, but you can’t quickly browse. Also, can’t view ONLY the stories in a particular group if there are stories in sub-groups.

Mingle
Requires each level of a hierarchy to have a defined card type. Scrum template offers Theme, Epic, and Story, giving two levels of grouping. Has a hierarchy view, and a tree view, for browsing.
Usability: Medium Downside: Can not create a ‘folder’ that can contain other ‘folders’. Also, the generic approach creates some confusing things, such as your themes and epics and stories and tasks all showing up as equals (in some views) and the default columns not making it so you can tell what is what.

Excel
To create one level of grouping, create one group column. To create two levels, create a second column. You MIGHT be able to do some custom programming to create a ‘group’ column and a ‘parent’ column and then navigate the tree with a custom form, but I’ve never tried.
Usability: Medium-Low No easy way to navigate, prone to errors or corruption

AgileOnDemand
Defines ONE level of grouping: Epic. Theme is a text field in the epic. You can’t put an epic inside an epic.
Usability: Low Tool imposes greatly on how you can organize your backlog

Usability Comparison Summary on a scale of 1 to 10