The first and the foremost point to be aware of, is the clarity in understanding the requirement at a granular level. A very critical factor, one needs to also ask, what purpose the tool serve and it is usability.

Are you looking for a tool for supporting new compliance or better collaboration or implementing a new process or something. If yes, then environment and implementation context should be also understood and their workings w.r.t the tool.

Secondly, determine who are the stakeholders, often their needs are ignored. Yet their viewpoints are very critical in order to have a successful outcome. List down the stakeholders’ needs and map their feedbacks on the tool.

For example, generally, it is assumed that a devops tool like Jira or Version one are used by developers. But this use case assumptions are not completely correct. Besides developers, other stakeholders could use, such as Product manager, Program manager, Sales Team.

Sales team would want to know the status of development or it could be the support team which would require. In this case the location of stakeholder is an important factor and one could use a hosted solution for this use case.

Thirdly, it is wise to know how much one can spend, understanding the budget will would help a great deal in aligning the goals with ROI.

Once you have a good clarity on the requirement, stakeholder definition and their needs along with an eye on the budget, it is time to select the tool. The basic things to look for, while selecting a tool, does it meets the requirement or not. If it is more or less meets the needs, then the next questions, is to tackle, is how easy is it to collaborate.

The basic feature should be evaluated while selecting the tool. Features include reporting, notification and audit, other features includes like customization. No tool is complete and can meet the complete requirement for that customer. Hence, one needs to evaluate the customization ability of a tool, which is the basic requirement test. Customization can be like adding a custom field or field value or renaming a field.

For large scale deployment and for others, addition criteria such as a standard web service API, Integration with other tool and scalability which then can agility to expand the solution.

Once all done, it’s time to evaluate the tools best fit for your ecosystem. You can prepare evaluation criteria matrix as a first step. Next step, Select few tools that matches your environment. Finally, evaluate the tools.

One may like to add additional steps of migration if you are migrating from one tool to another.