Agile Project Management
Agile is an iterative software development methodology that promotes team collaboration and adaptability throughout a project lifecycle. It is considered more responsive than the traditional waterfall model and 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 faster, and which matches the actual customer requirements more closely.
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 ‘Scaled Agile’ ALM solution combines the strength of its existing Application Lifecycle Management capabilities with the most commonly used Agile development practices. Thus provides the users an integrated 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 and 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. The Management can get a consolidated view of all projects without investing on disparate tools to manage different types of projects.Digité’s ‘Scaled Agile’ solution ensures quicker ROI with effective roll-out of Agile projects and increased team productivity.
Digité's Agile module enables users to manage the Feature/ User Story backlog, plan Releases and Iterations to schedule the user story development. They can 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 modules such as, Defect management, Test Management, and Configuration Management, where complete Traceability relationships between all software artifacts can be established.
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 Digité. The product owners/ teams can define the repository of user stories, establish hierarchy between them, and rank them in order of development priority. They can also provide rough effort estimates such that the overall release/ iteration can be planned to begin with. The ‘Batch Schedule’ feature available in Digité is extremely useful in managing and scheduling the user stories for execution.
Managing Releases of an Agile Project
The Project manager can plan for multiple releases for the software to be delivered using the ‘Release’ module available in Digité. This supports the way Agile releases are planned, where ranked user stories get tagged and shipped with the release (through iteration planning). 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 in Agile practice that enables regular deliveries and helps development teams focus on a "shippable" product. Thus it can be acknowledged with an early feedback from the customer. The Scrum Master can define a capacity (Story Points which can be delivered) for each Iteration and during the iteration planning meetings, product owners/ project managers can select the user stories, equivalent to the Iteration capacity, which need to be developed in an iteration based on the ranking. The team can revise the user story estimates during this meeting. Product owners can also define individual resource capacity available for an Iteration and then allocate stories accordingly to ensure balanced loading of all the resources.
Task Planning and Tracking in an Agile Project
Once the scope of Iteration has been defined, developers can select a user story and break it down to granular tasks. They can then assign tasks to themselves or other team members to be executed and report the progress through the 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. The effort thus reported against the tasks rolls-up to the Stories (or even Iteration/ Releases) giving the project teams a quick visibility to the iteration progress.
Progress Tracking of Agile Projects
Digité provides various standard reports & charts like Iteration Velocity, Burndown Charts, Release/ Iteration Cumulative Flow charts, Team Status Report, etc. for tracking the progress of Agile projects. Apart from these, all the standard dashboard and metrics from Digité’s other ALM modules, such as, Earned Value, Variance, Defect/ Test related metrics etc are also available to be used for Agile users or the projects with any hybrid methodologies. This enables an organization to track few core measures uniformly for all projects, at the same time allowing them the flexibility to execute projects using different methodology.
