Agile Development

It is no doubt that requirements gathering process is the most vital step in the development lifecycle. Whether it is software or application development, it can become very expensive to fix requirements error in comparison to a coding error. Many businesses do not give much attention to this vital ingredient and often experience software development failures. Therefore, it is essential to gather client’s requirements properly and analyze it thoroughly before proceeding further.

Moreover, proper analysis of requirements will give a brief structure of cost and time factors, and will also reduce costs that are incurred in scope creep and rework. There are situations when project managers ignore business objectives in order to give much attention to requirements. They have to create a balance so that the requirements can match and fit well with business objectives.

When you are gathering requirements, you will have huge amount of data in form of spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, word document, image files, and so on. In order to create a good communication channel among team-members, it is essential to assemble every project detail in a centralized database so that team-members can keep reference of requirements and changes in requirements before moving to the next step in development process.

In such a situation, there is a need of requirements management tool and can be fulfilled by taking Requirements Management Module by Digite. Digite is a leading Agile ALM and PPM solution provider that offers an effective requirements management tool to help in bugs-free development process. With Requirements Management Module, you will have flexibility in tracing, defining and even analyzing the requirements on priority-wise for the best product development process.

In Agile project management, the development of software product is based on iterative development to meet the clients’ requirements without exceeding the budget. Agile project management aims to develop a solution that is up-to-date by reducing or eliminating reworks and wastage. It is entirely based on collaboration between team-members and managers to develop a software product that can fit well within the competitive environment.

Digite is a leading ALM vendor that aims to provide Agile Project Management solution to clients who are engaged in software development process. Consider some of the features mentioned below that make Digite’s Agile module perfect for your development process:

1. With the help of Digite’s ‘User Story’ module, a proper backlog can be managed to prioritize the work for development process. The project managers can roughly estimate the time duration and can plan all the iterations accordingly. Digite also provides Batch Schedule feature that helps in managing and scheduling user stories for execution.

2. ‘Release’ module in Digite helps in planning multiple releases of the software. The stakeholders use the Release Approval workflow to review the planned releases before moving ahead to the next release.

3. With ‘Scheduling’ module, the work is assigned to different team-members so that work can be completed within a set time period. The iterations are then tested to maintain traceability and defects are identified to help in providing visibility to team members of the iteration progress.

4. Each planned release is divided into different iterations that help in delivering the project on-time. When these iterations are reviewed by the client before its release, it provides a chance to project managers to attain feedback from the client directly. The early feedback allows project manager to make the necessary changes by reducing reworks in the development process.

5. Digite also provides reports and charts to track the progress of Agile projects like Iteration Velocity, Release/ Iteration Cumulative Flow charts, Burndown Charts, Team Status Report, etc.

6. There are other ALM modules available with Digite like Earned Value, Variance, Defect/ Test related metrics etc for project managers using different working methodologies.

Digite Enterprise is a web-based collaborative framework that provides integrated Agile Application Lifecycle Management product suite for distributed teams and enterprises. This flagship product of Digite, Inc. offers a combination of tools from requirements and change management, test management, defects tracking and configuration management, supported by project management to process governance features. All these tools enable IT consulting companies to foresee future needs, traceability and project execution capability for better business decisions. This has led to an increase in demand of Digite Enterprise in IT consulting firms. Let’s take a look at some advantages of using Digite: 1.    With Requirements Management tool, IT consulting companies will be able to map user requirements on time and thereby managing those changes within on-going projects. This will enable them to meet their client’s expectations and improve their business output to a great extent. 2.    With powerful project management features in Digite Enterprise, IT companies will be able to control all the vital aspects of the project. This can be inclusive of defining the team, scheduling time for activities, allocating tasks and resources as well as final deployment of project on-time. 3.    Robust change management features allow project managers to provide full customer satisfaction without exceeding the budget by handling all changes in a smooth and efficient manner. 4.    IT consultancy companies can monitor the business processes with process analysis tools and features to ensure constant upgradation of weaker areas as well as implementation of efficient processes within on-going projects.

Digite Enterprise is a flagship product of Digite, Inc. which enables organizations to manage projects by providing apt solutions and also to prioritize the initiatives that deliver real business value. Digite Enterprise is a combination of Project Portfolio Management (PPM), SDLC (Software Development LifeCycle), BPM (Business Process Management) and Collaboration Technologies.

Here under are some of Digite’s benefits that enable its participants to increase business returns through better productivity and quality:

1. The success of a software project is dependent on the quality, innovation and functionality. This is achievable with Digite Enterprise wherein participants can customize processes in accordance with their on-going business practices and organization imperatives. 2. Digite Enterprise comes with an easy to use ‘store and apply’ infrastructure that is designed to clone experiences and processes efficiently for future use. 3. With Digite Enterprise’s community module, you get a chance to improve your own level of productivity by learning from other’s experiences. 4. It has features that can archive projects upto the last details to help you save cost, effort and information about resources for knowledge management or audit purposes. 5. It has traceability features that link requirements, tasks, issues, components and artifacts to help clients understand business relationships and hierarchy.

Every project manager wants to ensure that they have adequate resources to accomplish their projects on-time, within budget and without compromising with the quality. If you are running an organization, then you also must have a long list of projects that are undergoing simultaneously. Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is a management process with prime focus to help organizations acquire and view information about all similar projects at one location. Once the projects are available for view, then they can sort it out and prioritize each project by measuring it from certain criteria such as organizational goals, resources, cost, strategic value, and so on.

The effectiveness of portfolio management is largely dependent on accurate metrics and reliable data. Here comes the role of Digite Enterprise! It is a product of Digite, Inc. that provides effective enterprise project portfolio management capabilities. It has been designed to provide solutions for the day-to-day challenges that arise in managing portfolio and project management. Digite’s PPM also help in prioritizing initiatives, projects and make the right business decision that delivers real business value.

The main emphasis of CMMi (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is to plan, measure and track the processes on timely basis. In order to enhance the on-going process and improve business potential, many organizations are implementing CMMi to reap maximum benefits. There are speculations that CMMi benefits only large organizations but the truth is that it is more beneficial for smaller businesses. CMMi can practically help organizations to flourish consistently and to enable changes within their processes when they are inexpensive.

Digite, Inc. offers CMMi automation to various companies that strive in improving their business processes based on the CMMi model. This model will enable businesses to accelerate the maturity, perform process appraisal, develop action plan, allow SEPG/ PMO to model process templates and collate process improvement requests.

Hereunder are some of the advantages that an organization can gain after implementing CMMi successfully:

1. CMMi enhances business processes that are used to acquire, develop and maintain it. 2. Improvement in business processes enhances the quality of products and services, thereby improving overall efficiency. 3. CMMi increases scope to adopt more robust business practices 4. Improves transparency in the product lifecycle to ensure that they are meeting the customer expectations 5. Integrating the steps to improve measurement, risk and supplier management.

Kanban board is a lean process management system that provides you visual information about how much to produce, what to produce and when to produce it for improving the productivity of a business. Many business organizations have shown interest in using Kanban to improve their business potential.

To accelerate the whole process, Digite, Inc. has introduced Swift-Kanban as the first product in their Swift line of products. Swift-Kanban is a Web 2.0 visual Kanban Board having features like color-coded drag-n-drop story cards, setting of WIP (Work-in-Process) limits, To-Do lists, work-item classification, metrics dashboard and reports. In addition to this, it is a board where collaboration with team members becomes easy with features like discussion threads, audit logs, attachments, rich text editing, notifications, inbox, role-based security, etc.

Businesses are adapting Swift-Kanban to have full understanding about their processes visually and improving and optimizing them at the right time. If you want to adapt Swift-Kanban in your business process, you will enjoy the benefits mentioned below:

1. Easy technique to visualize the entire workplace i.e. various projects at one place 2. Managing your backlog and releases efficiently and effectively 3. Better Collaboration with your team members 4. Measuring and tracking the problem areas 5. Improving business processes and procedures

All the above advantages are beneficial for a business enterprise to deliver value to their valuable customers and stakeholders. It helps you to organize your work into multiple projects. Each project can have its own team, backlog and a Kanban board for managing the work efficiently. With this, you can visualize your work process and can define it in form of lanes and sub-lanes of the Kanban Board.

It gives you a chance to personalize the dashboard as per the business requirements wherein you can modify the lanes, add WIP limit and also can split lanes into sub lanes. All the lanes will define the work status of the project (a particular stage in the workflow) and provide other important information to other team-members for identifying and improving areas for better productivity.