How It Works

Acunote is a project management and Scrum software that is fast and easy to use, shows actual progress, not just wishful thinking, provides powerful analytics for data-driven management, and that is more than just Scrum: project management and collaboration for the whole company.


Projects

You use projects to split the work between multiple teams or departments.

Projects

Sprints

You use sprints to plan work for a group of people for a period of time. Sprints have start and end date. People sometimes call sprints "iterations" - it is the same thing. A sprint will contain list of tasks that you expect to finish in this time. Some people call this "project plan."

Sprints

Backlog

Tasks you plan to do in the future, but don't yet know when, go into Backlog. Backlog is like a sprint, except it doesn't have dates, so it's always in the future. When you are ready to work on some tasks in Backlog you move them to the next sprint. If some tasks aren't done when the sprint is over you copy them to the next sprint.

Tasks

Task is the work you plan to do. Acunote uses the single concept of "task" to represent task, user story, to do, bug, issue, wish, all other task types. Tasks store your work description, status, estimate and remaining time, comments, attachments, due dates, dependencies and more.

From both sprint and Backlog page you can create, edit and delete tasks.

Task-management

You can arrange tasks into parent-child hierarchies, reorder them with drag-and-drop, filter task lists and more. Acunote lets you do almost anything from the sprint/backlog tasklist. You will want to keep tasks you plan to do first at the top of the sprint, and task you plan to do last at the bottom.

Task-reorder-by-drag-n-drop

Search

You can always find a task using our search. Search is easy, and our powerful search language is like Google's, so even the advanced search is easy.

Task-search

Burndown and Analytics

Burndown-predictions-and-progress-report

You can view analytics for a sprint in the right sidebar. You'll see a burndown chart and predictions for when the work will be done. They give you easy-to-read information on work getting done, warn you early when things are not going right.

Burndown charts show how work remaining decreases over time. Acunote uses this data to make its predictions. There are different kinds of burndown charts that let you analyze work of the whole team, individuals, and more.

Ad-hoc analytics gives you more ways to look at your data for the case when you work on multiple projects and/or run multiple sprints in parallel.

Cross-sprint analytics lets you combine and analyze data from the selection of sprints from any projects. For example, you can analyze all present sprints and get a holistic view over your organization's performance at the present time.

Task analytics lets you combine data from high-level long-term tasks spanning several sprints and analyze the progress of that individual task completion.

Area Burndown

You can use area burndown chart to see whether your project will really get finished.

Area-burndown-shows-whether-project-will-really-finish

Wiki

Acunote includes a wiki, both for each project and for details of each task. You can use GUI editor to format text, or use our wiki language directly. The wikis supports product management workflow for writing and maintaining requirement documents and dashboards.

Wiki

Access Control

By default Acunote lets all users see all sprints and tasks in the organization. If you are a consulting company, or if you need to for some other reason, you can restrict access to projects to only some users. You can change this and more using access Control settings.

Timeline

Every operation in Acunote is recorded. You can see who did what and when on the Timeline page. You can also get email notifications for changes using News Feed.

Timeline

Source Control Integration

Acunote integrates with your source control. We support Subversion, Perforce, GitHub and Bitbucket (both Git and Mercurial).

Source-control-integration-adding-repositories

Changesets from integrated repositories appear in the Timeline.

Source-control-integration-changesets-in-timeline

You can then do code review (code inspection) of changesets from source control.

Code-inspection

Bugtracker Integration

You can integrate JIRA, Bugzilla, Mantis, FogBugz, Trac with Acunote. You can import bugs as tasks and keep the data synchronized between bugtracker and Acunote.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Acunote is easy to use for beginners and does not require any real training. But at the same time it has variety of features to boost productivity of advanced users. The number one such thing is keyboard shortcuts.

Many operations in Acunote can be controlled with keyboard.

Help on keyboard shortcuts is available at any page. Just press ? key.

Keyboard-shortcuts

The best way to learn more about Acunote is to play with it. Click the button below to choose your plan and sign up.