Agile Project Management
Digité Agile Project Management Software helps you easily manage Agile Projects. Digité announces support for Agile development in Ver 5.1 of its flagship product Digité Enterprise.
Agile is an iterative software development methodology that promotes team collaboration and adaptability throughout a project lifecycle. It is considered faster and more responsive than the traditional waterfall model which takes a more sequential approach to building software. As the name suggests, Agile means to be able to deliver quickly, change quickly, and change often. As a result, Agile projects deliver software that more closely matches actual customer requirements and deliver it faster.
Agile methodologies, being relatively new, are still in early stages of adoption in most organizations, where they need to co-exist with other methodologies & processes already in place.
Digité's agile solution combines the strength of its existing Application Lifecycle Management capabilities with the most commonly used Agile development practices to provide users a common tool for managing projects using traditional waterfall/ iterative development methodologies as well as Agile development practices. The "user stories" replace "Use-cases/ specs" of the traditional application development process. Iterations replace a monolithic project plan. Releases tie them together. This provides for a win-win proposition where Project Managers can choose between traditional or Agile processes depending on the needs of the project, and the Management, which can get a consolidated view of all projects without investing on disparate tools to manage different types of projects.
Digité's Agile module enables users manage the Feature/ User Story backlog, plan Releases & Iterations to schedule the user story development and quickly create task/ resource assignments where actual effort can be tracked. All these capabilities are integrated with the rest of Digité's Application Lifecycle Management features such as Defect management, Test Management, Configuration Management & the ability to maintain complete Traceability relationships between all software artifacts.
Key Features of Digité's Agile Project Management
Managing Feature Backlog in an Agile Project
A feature backlog can be managed using the ‘User Story' module of the Digité where product owners/ teams can define the repository of user stories, rank them in order of development priority and provide a rough effort estimates so that the overall release/ iteration can be planned to begin with. The ‘Batch Edit/add' capability available in Digité is extremely useful in managing/ scheduling the user stories for execution.
Managing Releases of an Agile Project
Project manager can plan for multiple releases in which the software will get delivered using the ‘Release’ module available in Digité. This supports the way Agile releases are planned, where ranked user stories get tagged to the release (through iteration planning) in which they need to be shipped. The ‘Release’ entity supports Digité’s workflow framework and hence the various planned releases can be reviewed/ approved by various stakeholders using the Release approval workflow.
Breaking Agile Project into Iterations or Sprints
Each release can be broken down into fixed duration sprints/ iterations (time boxing). Time boxing is a standard Agile practice, enables regular deliveries and helps development teams focus on a "shippable" product and thus get early feedback from the customer. During iteration planning meetings, product owners/ project managers can select the user stories which need to be developed in an iteration based on the ranking . The team can revise the user story estimates during this meeting.
Task Planning and Tracking in an Agile Project
Once the scope of an Iteration has been defined, developers can select a user story and break it down to granular tasks. They can then assign themselves or other team members to execute these tasks and report progress against them in Digité’s timesheet module. During testing, test cases can be linked to user stories to maintain granular traceability. Any defects found can also be logged/tracked against the user story.
Progress Tracking of Agile Projects
Digité provides various standard reports like Iteration Velocity; Burn-down Charts, etc. for tracking Agile projects.
