Scrum tool comparison: ZenTao vs. Redmine

Waterfall development and Scrum are two popular methodologies nowadays. The two share some similarities, including making stories, screening stories, decomposing tasks, assigning tasks to POs (developers), summarizing weekly reports, and presenting products after release. You can use both Redmine and ZenTao to manage Agile projects and they are also applicable to waterfall development.

Scrum

Scrum is an approach that focuses on developers and spiral iterations.

Keywords: passion, sprint, active

Slogan: being interactive, workable, collaborative, and responsive, which is corresponding to processes, documents, negotiations, and plans in traditional management.

ZenTao

ZenTao is an open source project management software, combining product management, project management, QA management, document management, company management and todo management. It is a professional and all lifecycle management (ALM) tool. Its design is based on Scrum, the most popular development methodology, and supports Agile.

Why not Redmine+TestLink+plug-in?

1. 51Testing report

According to The Ninth Survey Report on Software Test（2015）， ZenTao( 禅道 ) takes the lead among QA tools with 26% as its market share. Being open source, business model and Agile make ZenTao get stories and feedback from users profoundly and do sprints fast, which guarantee its reliability and accessibility.

2. Tencent TesterHome research

Tencent Mobile Quarter (TMQ) has also compared several popular project management tools by management modules. The result shows that part of the management in the lifecycle of a product is still missing even Redmine and TestLink can be complementary to each other. The complementary relations might cause the redundant functions and illogic internal workflow.

The green box is about ZenTao (禅道).

Detailed comparisons have been done after we test it and the comparison is made by five-point Likert scale.

From the table above, it is obvious that ZenTao features are better than Redmine and it has strong product management.

In the followings, we will talk about the differences between ZenTao and Redmine in regards to QA.

Test Run

	ZenTao ZenTao has interfaces for customizations. Each test run will trigger a test script. If the case failed, it can be converted to a bug for developers to fix.
	Redmine+TestLink TestLink can convert a test case to a bug. It can be integrated with Jira, Bugzilla, and Mantis, but Redmine.

Export test cases and bugs

	ZenTao The export file can be .csv, .xml, .html. Fields and coding can be customized. .html file has links that can link to the bug detail page, which very uses friendly.
	Redmine Redmine can export .pdf, and .csv.

Bug statistical reports

	ZenTao Report visualization is perfect and more items can be statistical.
	Redmine+TestLink The number of bugs is used, but it does not tell the convergence of bugs.

Personal work summary

For product owners and testers, they have to schedule their work and track the latest status of products and projects they are responsible for. Tester and developers are better interact and communicate with each other. Therefore, it would be great if there is a personal work summary of the project management tool they use.

	ZenTao It is highly customized. POs can check stories that have not been projected; developers and testers can check the feedback of bugs. Everyone can see what tasks to do and have been done on My Dashboard.
	Redmine Only the feedback of bugs can be viewed.

Email Reminder

ZenTao can send email notifications of tasks to be done and bugs to be resolved.

Todo List

Developers and POs focus on the tasks, stories, bug status, etc. Testers focus on tasks, use cases, bug status, and so on. The head of a department can arrange the task and assign it to POs, testers, and etc. In ZenTao, everyone can customize their own todo list which helps to arrange their own time.

Burndown Chart

ZenTao has time tracking features that are correspondent to Task in Agile methodology. Users can know the progress of the current project via Burndown chart.

Challenges using ZenTao

For users who are used to Redmine, there will be some learning curves, because they are not familiar with ZenTao. However, it can be overcome with some training and one actual project management practice.

CTO could urge everyone to update the progress of tasks and workflow be strictly implemented. Besides, administrative penalties and rewards will help the implementation better.

Reference

1. http://blog.csdn.net/tianzhihen_wq/article/details/70147932

2. https://www.zentao.pm/book/zentaomanual/free-open-source-project-management-software-zentao-8.html