Today’s businesses require project managers and systems to retain the ability to change when and where necessary regardless of which stage project development is in. This must also be achieved without severely impacting scope, time, and cost. Agile software development platforms enable businesses to adapt, plan, evolve, continuously improve, and quickly respond to change. Selecting the appropriate tool to manage agile development is essential. Specifications, requirements, and solutions change and develop through cross-functional cooperation. Change driven agile project management effectively addresses rapidly changing, short duration, or fast-tracked projects and encourages a team approach, project team and client collaboration, and flexible problem solving and decision making.
Agile development must consider that the client retains control of project execution, quality is never compromised, and deliveries are timely. Agile development tools provide clients with adaptability through delivered iterative development derived from continued open team and client collaboration throughout the project’s life. Software specifications changes are accommodated at any stage during the project through agile development. Iterative development permits development process customization. The software is delivered at set intervals allowing client feedback to be used to make changes to the software specifications. Open office and free communication is essential to agile development, not only among the programming team, but with the client.
Agile development and management tools are only intended to aid the agile process, such as moving project tasks forward from one stage to the next. Different businesses prefer different agile development tools. Cost, ease of learning and operation, and complexity determine a client’s choice of agile development tools and add-ons.
Jira Agile monitors product development and team progress and assists in issue organizing and work assignments. It is a good “large company” tool. It integrates with JIRA, Confluence, and Dev Tools such as Stash. In addition to identifying and reporting on team pace, progress, and commitment, it aids in building a sprint backlog and creating and estimating stories. Scrum predictably and uniformly delivers complex solutions and its established lean kanban methodology incrementally changes the existing process. Kanban can be effectively applied to software development, DevOps, IT operations, and other processes. JIRA Agile is compatible with JIRA Capture and supports agile team exploratory testing. Some reviewers consider it expensive, complex, and “UI/UX is not good.”
Jira Agile Add-On facilitates the development of user stories, building of sprint backlogs, and visualization of team activities. The Jira Agile Add-On may be a good choice when the client has a defined project lifecycle with a specified workflow it is expected to go through. Code, configurations, and documentation may be independently reviewed and tested before accepting each phase of work.
Yodiz is considered a good small business / startup tool. Yodiz has dependency tracking’ for stories and follows the scrum process that predictably and uniformly delivers complex solutions. Backlog management is simplified with a centralized online repository that quickly prioritizes stories. The scrum tool may be customized and effectively organizes backlog items and drag-and-drop user stories, tasks and issues. It sets sprint goals and plans sprint contents, defines team specific “Definition of Done”, offers sprint analytics, burndown charts, average velocity, and trend graphs. Dashboards provide detailed statistics, graphs, user level reports, time sheets and more. Its epics-features represent requirements that reduce larger features into smaller stories for sprints and releases. This tool enables teams to create, schedule, plan, and prioritize current and future sprints and sprint user stories and issues. Sprints may be linked to release and track progress across teams. Multiple projects and issues are tracked and managed using the visual issue board. Yodiz offers a UI with group chat and real-time activity updates, notifications emails, updates, and tags. Yodiz operates on Amazon servers adding security and reliability. It may be integrated with existing workflows and connected with services such as Jenkins, Uservoice, GitHub, Dropbox and Zendesk.
Most reviewers seem to prefer Yodiz, considering it “superior,” easy to use UI/Ux, and easier to learn than other agile tools.
Rally is a cloud-based agile lifecycle management platform. It offers three levels to suit small, large, and enterprise sized companies. Rally – Community is free for 10 users / five projects. Agile and lean processes are used to manage project and team activities, work, and progress. Rally – Enterprise makes work visible across multiple teams, and is scaled to an unlimited number of users. Rally – Unlimited connects to Enterprise features, with added portfolio, collaboration, and analytics features. It is also scaled to an unlimited number of teams. Custom pages, apps, and dashboards that automate a variety of development processes are included. Teams and clients rely on Rally to report sprint burndown and team velocity reports. Software product teams use scrum and maintain their product and sprint backlogs. These agile development tools manage all work types, enable teams to create, schedule, plan, and prioritize sprints and sprint user stories and issues, offer training, and ongoing collaboration. Rally offers are comparable to Jira and Yodiz. Overall, reviewers consider Rally expensive, complex, and slow.
There are many other agile development tools available that offer boards, notifications email support, burndown capabilities, logging, sprints, team monitoring, customizing, and other features.
Axosoft OnTime Scrum part of Axosoft’s OnTime platform, is a HTML-5 based program that helps development teams manage backlog, releases, and sprints. It features burndown charts, a management dashboard, collaboration, and coding and bug-repair tracking.
LeanKit uses “a cloud-based whiteboard metaphor” for tracking teams and organization processes. Cards represent work items, and status updates are provided. Teams see workload distribution and may export historical data. Scrum and Kanban extends software development, support, and team monitoring.
Using the most relevant and effective agile development tools, managers control rapidly changing conditions. Change-based agile project management successfully improves team productivity, customer and client relations, product, and service in a timely and cost effective manner through collaboration.