I have been using Assembla now for a few years and want to give a shout out to the company for making a great product.

If you have not heard of Assembla – it is a Scrum / Kanban / Agile project management system on the web. It is cheap, with prices ranging from free for small public projects to more expensive for multi-project many user service levels. My experience has been with the $490 / year level which gets several private project spaces, a dozen users or so and quite a bit of storage. Check out the web site for current prices and plans.

Swiss Army Knife: Assembla is one stop shopping for managing a project. Features include: Tickets, CardWall, Wiki, Messages, Version Control. Really, everything you need, all in one place, accessible from every place.

Let’s take a look at some of the features in more detail.

Tickets:

Tickets or cards are the most important part of Agile project management. Because they are used so frequently – they should be quick and easy to enter. Ideally – I should be able to just mail in a ticket. Ticket priorities change frequently, so I should be able to drag and drop them. I’ve had to work with systems where entering a ticket is like filling in a tax form. Assembla has just the essentials, nothing more and nothing less. You can add fields, but it is a simple effective system without the scripting that other systems have. I like the simplicity and SPEED.

Collaboration:

Agile is all about collaboration. To me, that means everything is out there and visible to the people who need to see it. The wiki is a great place to put documentation, brainstorming, processes, standards, knowledge base articles etc. Messages encourage brainstorming and provide a stream of consciousness on a topic. Files provide a place to upload Word documents if you are into that kind of thing. You can also link to Google docs. Snippets let people comment and collaborate on a block of code. There is a StandUp tool so that if your team is distributed, you can have not real time stand up meetings. There is a Twitter feed.

Version Control:

Git, Mercurial, Perforce, Subversion, GitHub, BitBucket are all supported.

Assembla can be backed up using Amazon Backup, or you can tell the system to generate a backup set as a file you can download and archive.

There are many charts, and an API if you want to create custom reports off of the raw data.

Ticket views can be customized with filters and adding / removing fields. This is fantastic as it lets lets me get a quick and detailed view of the status of tickets.

Weak areas: The system security is not very granular. For example, you can’t give a consultant access to the source code repository without also giving her visibility into the whole project. Normally visibility is a strength, but in one case, we just wanted to give a consultant access to the repository without giving visibility into the total scope of the project. Time tracking could be improved. For example; if you make a mistake, like entering that you worked 16 hours when you meant to say 6, you can’t change it once it is saved.

Certainly for each individual tool, you could find a better tool somewhere else. However, having everything in one place, in essentially one tool, with cross link capability, Assembla has been a huge productivity boost.