Best Agile Reporting Tools For Software Teams

As the saying goes, “What gets measured gets done.”

Managing an agile project is no exception. You need reliable and accurate data to learn from experience, improve your workflows, track progress, and course-correct. 

Need help choosing one that meets your needs? See our top picks.

What Is Agile Reporting, and Why Is It Important?

Reporting is a critical component in the agile framework. Insights from agile reports can help you make decisions and evaluate success by considering various factors, such as context, process, roadblocks, and problem resolution.

Agile reports are outcome-oriented. Their metrics can help you focus on delivering maximum value as a team. You can:

• Uncover insights about your process, such as bottlenecks, dependencies, and team performance, to inform real-time decision-making. 
• Measure progress against your project plan to stay on track.
• Evaluate how efficient your scrum team is in resolving issues and delivering value to instill a customer-centric mindset across the organization.
• Address risks and challenges before they can derail your project.
• Calculate the amount of work (e.g., story points) your team can address in one iteration to create accurate estimations for your sprints.
• Leverage the insights to make targeted improvements, optimize service delivery, meet user expectations, and increase customer satisfaction. 
• Share reports with product owners and stakeholders to improve transparency and communication.  

To get the most out of agile reporting, you need the right tools to gain visibility and real-time insights on work progress and team performance. 

But with so many agile reporting tools available on the market, which one is right for you? We have done the legwork and compiled a list of the best ones. 

7pace: The Best Agile Reporting Tool for Time Tracking

Time tracking is the foundation of agile reporting. But it’s also the trickiest part because most developers hate jumping through hoops to log their time in a separate application. 

Time tracking and reporting should be as invisible as possible, and a frictionless experience is essential for collecting accurate and granular data. After all, your insights are only as good as the quality of the input.

That’s why we built 7pace, an ultra-low-effort time-tracking tool that gives you the data you need without pulling everyone’s teeth to get it. 

You can generate different types of agile reports with 7pace, including personal overview, team overview, backlog reports, epics reports, and last tracks. Team members can analyze their team velocity, time spent on each activity, and more to manage their time and performance.

Unlike most time reporting tools, 7pace is a truly integrated solution that allows developers to track time where they work (i.e., on Azure DevOps and GitHub) and associate the hours with work items to support granular reporting and analytics.

Jira: The Best Reporting Tool for Agile Software Development Project Management

Atlassian Jira is well-known for its project management features and collaboration functionalities. You can set up Scrum and Kanban boards, as well as visual roadmaps, to plan and track your workflows.   

Jira offers various types of reports, including agile reports, issues analysis reports, forecast and management reports, and custom reports.

For the Kanban board, you can create a cumulative flow diagram to understand cycle times and identify bottlenecks and a control chart to evaluate team performance for specific tasks or development stages.

With the Scrum board, you can generate burndown charts, sprint reports, velocity charts, version reports, epic reports, epic burndowns, and release burndowns.

Team members can set up their Jira Scrum dashboard to track agile metrics based on their roles. You can bring relevant reports together and see the progress of all your initiatives in real-time to inform accurate decision-making.

Zoho: The Best Agile Reporting Tool for Backlog Prioritization and Release Management

Managing product backlog and releases can get messy if you don’t have the right tool to organize workflows and streamline sprint planning. 

Zoho Sprints’ agile reporting and dashboard features give you a bird’s-eye view of your projects. You can track release schedules and manage sprint backlog activities in one place.

It also allows you to compare the actual timeline with the original plan and adjust due dates, milestones, deliverables, and resources based on the team’s velocity.

Besides velocity charts, burnup charts, burndown reports, and cumulative flow diagrams, you can use the sprint counter to keep track of each project’s overall completion.

You can also use release notes to analyze resource usage for each release and timesheet reports to understand hour distribution across sprints, work item types, and users.

Other Agile Reporting Tools to Consider

Got other priorities? Check out these agile project management tools:

Clickup for Project and Document Management

Clickup allows you to build customized dashboards for development sprints, resource management, and business management to track progress, make calculations, and manage workload.

Kanbanize for Kanban Projects

This software combines Kanban features and business process automation capabilities into a virtual workspace. You can prioritize work, manage multiple projects, and better structure and visualize your daily workflows.

Planbox for Running Retrospectives

Planbox has a range of evaluation tools to make sprint retrospectives more comprehensive. It offers features required by different roles (e.g., customer service, finance, marketing, product owner) to support seamless collaboration.

How to Choose the Right Agile Reporting Tool For Your Development Team

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to finding the best agile reporting tool. Here are some top criteria and features to consider:

• Track the right KPIs to support the Agile methodology and include a dashboard to show key metrics, such as burndown and velocity at a glance.
• Offer advanced reporting features such as progress reports for stakeholders and team performance evaluation.
• Work with your existing workflows and offer API integrations with your current tool stack for a seamless experience.
• Include templates to help you visualize data and generate reports without reinventing the wheel.
• Streamline the reporting process so team members don’t have to jump through hoops to log their time.
• Provide customization options that meet the reporting and budget requirements of your team, stakeholders, and your organization.
• Generate real-time insights to help team members understand their progress and make adjustments to stay on track.
• Offer a pricing plan that works for your team structure and budget.

If you’re still on the fence, the good news is that most platforms offer free trials, so you can take the software out for a spin and see if they meet your reporting needs.

Download 7pace right now and give it a whirl to see how easy it is to track time directly on Azure DevOps or GitHub.