To achieve success in agile development, flexibility to maintain an organization is highly important. The ideal way to do this is to deploy a set of tools that help people track the project and organize the progress of the team.
There are many software products created to support managers, set priorities and help developers write code that address them. Few of these tools are created to track various forms of development, making use of projects that are more centrally managed, but are simply flexible enough to be utilized for agile development. The remaining tools are especially built to fit the agile model and nurture more programmer freedom as possible.
A graphic dashboard is common for all these agile tools, it reports about the team’s progress and meeting the goals. Some tools are more sophisticated, they integrate with continuous integration tools and code repositories that create automated graphs which show the evolution of new code.
Below listed are some of the top agile tools that are forming the foundation teams to depend upon to ship code on time or before the schedule:
1. Source control tools
Git is one of the many tools which is not built only for agile teams but is still important. It offers more flexibility that many teams require to move ahead. The scarcity of a single central repository makes it easy for different developers to follow different ways and then merge their code when required. Git is supported widely and it’s hosting services are used by many temas to keep their code organized. Some of the important source control tools include Subversion, Mercurial and CVS. Git can be used either through the command line or with a GUI, such as Tower, which is our preferred tool. Tower (available for Mac and Windows) provides visual aids to help you track the status of your repositories at all times, and with just a keystroke, you can easily undo any mistakes you may have made.
2. Continuous Integration tools
Similar to Git, continuous integration tools are not explicitly created to help agile development, instead it would be difficult to imagine running a vast agile team without their support. The tools add a layer of processing automatically when code is committed, helping to confirm that the team is working smoothly. The tools contain a lot of plugins for tasks like compiling statistics or creating documentation. Their most crucial job is to run unit tests which decides whether the software is performing well after the code is added to the stack.
There are many continuous integration tools that suit well with agile management systems, they are Jenkins, Travis CI, Integrity and Strider.
3. Team Management Tools
Active Collab
It is organized to help software enabled shops deliver code and account for their time. From swapping between tasks to generating bills and tracking time, It does them all. At the heart of the system is a list of tasks that can be assigned and tracked from conception to completion.
Pivotal Tracker
It is one of the best among the bunch of tools from pivotal labs designed to support agile development. As we go deep into the project, it consists of a page that lists the tasks often expresses as stories.
Agile Manager
It guides and organizes teams from the initial stages as they plan and deploy working code through the agile model. Between every code sprint, developers and scrum masters record their status and on the issues and user stories.
Jira Agile
It creates a layer of agile project management that communicates with other major tools from Atlassian. Every team creates a list of project tasks with the help pfa tool called confluence and tracks them on Kanban board which is a centre of focus in attacking the code.
Telerik TeamPulse
Its is known for its large amount of frameworks for creating applications in the mobile marketplace. They have bundled all their own code into teampulse, a simple tool useful in tracking projects. A screen is presented which displays a page full of tasks required to be completed and follows the team as the work progresses.
Planbox
It offers a procedure where multiple teams work towards a common goal. Planbox contains projects, that are built on items, filled with tasks. As the team completes tasks,
Planbox tracks the progress and generates reports for all stakeholders.
Leankit
This mimics the whiteboards that are present in the conference rooms where most of the projects start. It lets all the members in the team to post viral notes, cards that represent the tasks to be addressed.
Axosoft
This tools is used for tracking projects, it happens in three different ways.
- The release planner displays a tabular view of bugs, tasks and user stories.
- Drag and drop is a process which developers follow for different entries to assign and declare them as finished.
- The burndown charts graphically represent how fast the team can converge on is goal.
VersionOne
While working in a large enterprise that embraces agile development, a tool is needed which is customised to shift multiple teams working on different projects because they need to work collaboratively. Here, VersionOne comes into play by organizing all the groups involved in development across all the enterprises by offering a stable communication platform.
