Creating a low-cost Agile development toolset

Agile Development techniques are on the rise, rapidly transforming how software development teams work and manage their software development process. Agile is setting itself into the consciousness of development teams all over the world.

Traditional development projects could last anywhere from a months to years. This meant status reporting was a significant management challenge and would require considerable time and effort with the involvement of many people.

Many organisations involved in software development are focused on ‘getting to market’ quickly. As a result, agile concepts have proven to be the most suitable at reducing risk, delivering products early and maintaining control of the budget.

Agile development means different things to different people. The reality is, it is about simple process rather than heavy supporting tools. The provision of a few tools from the open source market, plus some commercial solutions are all you need to create a usable, light weight but effective Agile development process e.g. Low cost solution (mostly open source):

• Subversion – manage file artifacts under version control
• Trac – record all change control requests
• MoinMoin – Wiki to manage Agile stories
• Agilo – managing Agile stories
• AgileSCM – integrate Subversion & Trac with a Agile workflow

Commercial solution (some open source):

• Subversion – manage file artifacts under version control
• Jira + GreenHopper – record all change control requests
• Confluence – Wiki to manage Agile stories
• AgileSCM – integrate Subversion & Trac with a Agile workflow

The ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) layer is essential in both of the above examples in order to glue together the different point tools. Without ALM, companies end up writing and supporting their own branching, delivering, baselining and quality control processes on top of the tools.

Spending more time coding and less time fighting development tools, or tied up with administration, is a key factor in reducing time to market, this can be achieved through the use of ALM products such as AgileSCM. AgileSCM is the browser-based ALM from Clearvision which integrates with Subversion, Git and Mercurial to improve cross-team communication, closing the gap between developers, team leaders and the business.

AgileSCM offers project managers piece of mind and greater control, providing tracking information such as:

• Who is working on this release?
• What is in progress/complete?
• What has been previously released?

Furthermore, AgileSCM integrates fully with a number of change management tools such as Atlassian Jira, IBM Rational, ClearQuest, Trac and more. In a nutshell, AgileSCM provides a necessary policy and process layer whilst allowing team leaders to evaluate and prioritise tickets from a change request, before assigning them accordingly to the developer. This helps the developer to remain focused. Once the developer accepts a ticket, this creates a state change and produces a branch. Finally, depending on the permissions granted by the team leader, a developer has the ability to close/deliver an item of work.

See how an ALM solution can benefit your business. To download a free annual version of AgileSCM now, click here.

For more details please contact us .

Clearvision Survey

SCCM point tools such as Subversion or Git and Trac or Jira do not include an Application Lifecycle layer i.e there is no process to manage branching, delivering code, quality of code, etc.

Would you prefer to;

1. Write your own ALM layer using hooks and triggers to implement a process.

OR

2. Purchase a ALM tool which integrates the tools together to implement a sound process.

Take 20 seconds to register your vote here.