5 herramientas esenciales de soporte al ciclo de vida en Agile

In particular, within the universe of agile methods there are numerous tools that help the development team to create, build, plan, manage and monitor the progress of User Stories (US) and support the organization and management of backlogs, sprints, burndown charts, retrospectives and most of the artifacts that are specific to agile management.

However, there is no “silver bullet” among tools. There is no one that has everything at the same time and with each function at the expected level. Some place greater emphasis on the creation and monitoring of US, leaving aside the generation of statistics or metrics. Some tools seek simplicity at the cost of marginalizing functionality. Others incorporate more advanced services, but are more complex to use, extending the training period and learning curve. As always, it is important to take into account the advantages and disadvantages of each when choosing the tool to use. Below are described some of the main tools, detailing their strengths and weaknesses [2].

Tool #1 – JIRA

JIRA is a project management application based on the J2EE standard, offering flexibility and adaptability to meet the specific needs of different project management models. This allows it to easily adapt to agile methods such as Scrum or Kanban .

JIRA has customizable and comprehensive filters, which provide excellent possibilities for management, metrics generation and reporting, add-ons, JIRA extras (some paid, others not) that help with specific needs. For example, JIRA Agile provides Scrum boards (for iterative and incremental processes) or Kanban boards (to manage flow in demand-driven processes) and allows building and managing the backlog (epics, US, swimlines, etc.), having collaborative work between team members and keeping agile metrics such as Burndown charts, velocity, CFDs, among others.

Another notable aspect is the integration with other tools that facilitate workflows and allow, for example, to achieve complete traceability of requirements, US, Test cases, technical documentation and other artifacts. Among many other integrations, we could mention:

• US documentation (and knowledge management) in Confluence and transform into tasks in JIRA.
• Facilitate development workflow by automatically updating JIRA issues when a developer pushes code to Stash or Bitbucket by committing.
• Implement Continuous Integration using Bamboo and monitor the status of builds from within JIRA.
• Integration with other frameworks such as SONAR[1] for the use of code metrics such as rule violations or duplicate code.

Tool #2 – EasyBacklog

EasyBacklog is a tool focused on simplicity. It is extremely user-friendly, so creating and monitoring US, sprints and backlogs is not difficult. It is based heavily on visual interaction, which makes the “drag and drop” mode a convenient option when transferring US from the backlog to the current sprint.

The cost of the tool’s simplicity is its limited functionality. It doesn’t provide any statistics, nor is it possible to assign tasks to specific team members. These weaknesses impose strong restrictions on its use. However, it is perfect if you just want to manage US and monitor their progress.

Two success stories of the tool come from a domain where it is not easy to imagine using agile methodologies: software development for advertising agencies. However, two English companies, Aqueduct and TMW, have used EasyBacklog with great satisfaction [3].

It was difficult for Aqueduct to adopt agile development at the beginning, since their clients were used to a fixed budget and more “conservative” work schemes. However, they found in Easybacklog a friendly and simple way to communicate functionality to clients, which allowed them to “educate” them in the agile world, and they managed to adopt a hybrid scheme between an agile description of development and a contractual scheme of fixed payments.

For TMW, the tool allowed them to introduce the agile world in an iterative and incremental way in their projects, prioritizing first the benefits of communication and dynamics that agile methodologies impose on teamwork. Initially, they included small iterations in only some projects since it is not a domain particularly suited to agile development. However, the ease of use of the tool allowed for rapid acceptance at all levels of the company, reinforcing commitment to the project and better guidance for meeting deadlines. Word quickly spread throughout the company about this new way of working, achieving increasing participation from resources. Currently, it has become the norm at TMW to describe and communicate the functionality in US, as well as specify acceptance criteria as early test case specifications.

Tool #3 – SeeNowDo

SeeNowDo offers a simple and easy user interface for creating and specifying US, as well as for generating sprints, and the corresponding assignment of US to sprints. Although it provides functionality for statistics and charting, it has two major limitations: on the one hand, there is no concept of backlog. Everything must be developed within sprints, which makes US management and handling difficult. On the other hand, its performance is not good. Even with small projects with few US, the tool becomes slow. Its main advantage is that all its functionality is available in the free version and it is not necessary to pay for additional features.

However, it is important to highlight the main objective of this tool: working with agile teams in a distributed and remote manner. It is increasingly common for the different members of the team not to be physically working together on a daily basis, so it is necessary to have a distributed tool that facilitates and synchronizes communication between everyone. For these contexts, SeeNowDo is the ideal tool.

Tool #4 AgileFant

AgileFant is one of the tools that has seen the greatest growth in popularity and number of users. It is quite complete, including the generation of statistics, velocity, burndown charts and the use of metrics. An interesting feature is that it offers the possibility of defining general US (also called EPIC Stories) and then refining them, adding more detail as the project progresses. Among its weak points, we can mention the lack of flexibility to customize the tool, and its non-existent integration with other systems, which can undermine its use in corporate environments.

It is a tool with several success stories in the professional world. For example, Sarah Schwanbeck, Senior Engineering Manager for Yahoo!, recommends AgileFant as the ideal tool for managing backlogs, widely used in the company’s developments. Coriant guarantees its good performance. In particular, they emphasize that the tool has helped them to understand more precisely the functionality of a project that has already been developed and what remains to be done, facilitating the administration and management of projects.

Tool #5 RallyDev

RallyDev is also a powerful tool for agile project management. It has advanced features, including the automatic generation of different tracking diagrams and the possibility of exporting them to different formats. This is particularly useful for the automatic generation of reports. It also provides the possibility of change control and revisions for US management. Finally, within each US it is possible to define acceptance criteria as test cases, which facilitates interaction with the testing phase. Its weak points include an unfriendly interface and poor performance in terms of the expected response time for some features.

RallyDev is widely used in many companies in different areas. In the media and entertainment sector, NBC Universal , Editorial Abril or Gazillion Entertainment highlight its flexibility and rapid acceptance within their teams. Tata Communications explains that by using RallyDev they achieved improvements between 30 and 50% in project costs and duration, a better predisposition for innovative ideas, better visualization of progress and also better teamwork dynamics. Finally, from the IT world, companies such as SeaGate or BMC Software also support its use. The latter company highlights the success achieved with a staff of 900 employees distributed across several continents. This demonstrates the adaptability of the tool not only for small development teams, but also for larger challenges.

References:

[1] http://www.sonarsource.com/

[2] http://www.agile-tools.net/

[3] http://blog.easybacklog.com/