Does your organization...

• Want to scale agile and manage multiple teams, projects and programs?

  As agile development initiatives scale beyond a few projects and teams, the need for a centralized agile planning and management tool becomes more critical. Trying to prioritize and manage requirements and update status across multiple projects and teams with spreadsheets isn’t scalable, nor does it provide consolidated reporting across releases, track teams working on multiple projects or deliver project-specific dashboards. As you scale your agile initiatives, you’ll need an agile tool that supports the entire range of product planning, tracking, collaboration and reporting activities.

• Use multiple tools to manage different phases of the development cycle?

  Phased or waterfall development typically fosters the simultaneous use of multiple tools that each manage a different aspect of the software development process – requirements, tasks, tests, issues, defects, etc. Agile development, on the other hand, promotes a tightly-integrated process that coordinates all aspects of development in short, frequent iterations and releases. From high-level feature planning through task and test identification, agile tools are designed to manage cross-functional processes for more complete, accurate visibility.

• Need better project visibility?

  Agile measures and evaluates project status based on working, tested software, but it can be difficult and time consuming to provide accurate visibility into project status to remote team members and stakeholders without a centralized agile project management tool. Agile tools provide real-time access to portfolio-level reports to help assess whether you’re on track or at risk of missing key deadlines.

• Support distributed teams, telecommuters or nomadic team members?

  Recent survey results* indicate that well over half of all software development is performed by distributed teams, whether in different offices or half-way around the world. Challenges in communication, time zones, and culture are now the norm. This exacerbates the need for everyone on the team to share a single, trusted repository that is up to date with accurate project information.

• Have a growing backlog that includes hundreds or thousands of work items?

  Managing 100 story cards on a whiteboard or in a spreadsheet may be simple. But as the consolidated backlog of features, requests, tasks, tests, defects, etc. that most technology organizations generate grows into hundreds or thousands, additional infrastructure is often necessary for tracking, prioritizing and managing all of the tasks and associated work.

• Try to manage agile processes with traditional project management tools?

  Using traditional project management tools that don’t inherently support agile processes and don’t include built-in agile workflow for planning, tracking and reporting can be a recipe for failure. Traditional tools that only provide agile templates or plug-ins aren’t designed to help you scale your agile initiatives, nor do they support all aspects of managing your agile programs. Agile tools facilitate planning and tracking by release and iteration, simplify making changes to project priorities and plans and automate reporting of key agile metrics such as velocity and burndown charts.

• Want better communication and collaboration?

  While no tool should replace the benefits achieved from daily planning, face-to-face communication, product reviews and retrospectives, an agile management tool can consolidate and facilitate the project planning and tracking needs of customers, product managers, project managers, programmers, and testers in a single environment.

*Based on results from the 5th Annual State of Agile Survey, receiving over nearly 5,000 completed surveys from respondents in 90+ countries.

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