Axosoft OnTime does not support Scrum out of the box

In spite of what Axosoft's sales demo and their Google Ad says, Axosoft OnTime does not support Scrum out of the box, and according to the company's owner, they never intended for it to.

However, they do insinuate that OnTime can be easily configured to support Scrum.

This is not entirely a true statement. 

Since the last time I mentioned this, I've gotten several e-mails asking for clarification...

"How can one of the most successful Scrum shops out there, be using daily a product that doesn't support Scrum?"

Firstly, let me say that I love OnTime.

It's very intuitive, and it works well for us, but the tweaks we had to make to support Scrum went far beyond simple configuration.

To use OnTime with Scrum, we relabeled "Features" as "Product Backlog", "Tasks" as "Sprint Backlog". We track Impediments through Incidents, however we did not relabel Incidents, as Incidents are also used by customer support. We leveraged user-defined fields to denote teams and members and used the workflow steps to drive QA and customer interaction.

The major drawbacks are...

• There reporting tool cannot be used to create burndown charts. We create them all using Microsoft Reporting Services and have the automatically e-mailed to team members. We also had to store some data outside of their database tables, as the historical data needed for burndown charts is not tracked by OnTime.
• The Customer Portal does not include Tasks, so Sprint Backlog Items cannot be viewed by customers acting as members (either Pigs or Chickens) of your Scrum team. We workaround this by showing OnTime in webinar standup meetings and automated reports.
• There is no support for calculated user-defined fields. We had to create a trigger on the database to calculate time remaining.
• Some of their fields (like Estimated and Actual Duration) are not used by Scrum, but OnTime's canned reports, Quick Add Task Bar, etc. expect these fields to be used and cannot be redirected to use user-defined fields.

Everything else—with the aid of a few user-defined fields and custom workflows—works perfectly.

Comments

[HL Arledge]

James

We do a little magic behind the scenes with database triggers and additional fields that we've added to the OnTime database. It is not the greatest solution, but until Axosoft steps up, it is likely the best solution.

Thanks,
HL

[James]

Hi, thanks for the extremely valuable information. I haven't been able to find comparable info for getting OnTime going for scrum. I am very curious about how you are storing the historical data outside of OnTime. Is this done with a secondary tool, or have you integrated it into OnTime some how?

[HL Arledge]

Nyx, the team is constantly improving our configuration, but if you check-out my posting on the Axosoft forum, that should get you started.

http://community.axosoft.com/forums/thread/13479.aspx

[Nyx]

I am in the process of trying to configure OnTime for Scrum, any settings, insights, or information that you could provide would be greatly appreciated.