Hello everyone,

The new year has arrived, let’s review what happened in 2012 and tell you about what is coming for iceScrum and Kagilum in 2013.

2012 in review

By mid-2011, we launched Kagilum in order to answer the increasing amount of demands from iceScrum users. Back in time, iceScrum was already a good tool to manage Scrum projects.

However, some features and services were more and more asked by the users. As advocated by agile principles, we listened to you and released these improvements on a regular basis.

iceScrum Services

Many users needed a consistent range of services to help them taking the best from the tool according to their specific needs.

We worked hard and we are proud to say that we think these objectives have been met:
– Full range of hosting services: shared hosting (iceScrum Cloud), dedicated hosting, remotely managed server,
– Technical and methodological support by email, Skype, phone,
– Custom training according to your knowledge of Agile methods, Scrum, and iceScrum

Enterprise features

At first, we wanted iceScrum to be a great implementation of Scrum principles. However, in enterprise contexts, project management tools have to offer additional features.

That’s why we launched iceScrum Pro. Try it for free and get these features:
– Server, user and project administration in a dedicated user interface,
– Source Code Management tool integration: SVN, Git, GitHub, Google Code,
– LDAP & Active directory integration,
– User availabilities per sprint on a daily basis,
– Cloud attachments from Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive,
– Product roadmap to enhance the product vision by planning features into releases,
– Jabber chat to stay connected with your coworkers: Google Talk, Windows Live, Facebook chat,
– Icebox to keep rejected stories.

General improvements

Moreover, even if iceScrum was already a good tool, the community asked for certain features and improvements.

We take what you say into account and thanks to this feedback, iceScrum is now a lot better:
– New features: acceptance tests, finder, dependencies,
– More customization: custom tags, colors, attachments,
– More integration: documented RESTful Web Services API, IDE plugin,
– Improved stability,
– Improved performances,
– Improved user interface for a better user experience.

Finally, we improved a lot the getting started experience with:
– iceScrum Server, a desktop application to easily manage your server,
– Documentation for installing, configuring and using iceScrum: https://www.icescrum.com/documentation/,
– Free “1 user & 1 project” iceScrum Cloud plan included with your Kagilum account.

Plans for 2013

Now we have summarized what happened in 2012, let’s take a moment and have a look at the big picture.

According to your feedback, iceScrum is now a mature tool, backed by a wide range of services that address most organisation needs.

However, the world is changing fast and so are your needs. New agile practices become popular, enterprises mutate, agile methods scale up, tools are more and more interconnected, everything goes mobile…

Our roadmap for 2013 is quite simple, listening to these changes and implementing them:
– More tool integration,
– More innovation games,
– More Kanban,
– More large-scale project management,
– More mobile support.

Additionally, here are some new year’s resolutions:
– Improve the consistency of iceScrum.org and Kagilum.com usability so you won’t get lost,
– Tell you more about our vision of agile principles and their implementation in iceScrum.

We live in an agile world, you are part of the development process! It begins in our sandbox, where you can comment existing stories and create new ones: http://tools.icescrum.org/p/ICESCRUM#sandbox.

May this year be more agile than ever 🙂