Agile Development Methodology

Support for Agile in the Industry-Leading Portfolio Management Platform

Planview Enterprise supports both traditional waterfall project processes and the iterative Agile methodology, because many organizations enjoy the benefits of leveraging both approaches.

Now, your portfolio management solution of choice can support development methods of choice.

Planview Enterprise for Agile helps you:

Figure 1. Planview Enterprise offers support for and integration points into the Agile methodology

• Improve customer satisfaction by continuously infusing the voice of the customer throughout the development process
• More effectively manage customer and market-driven changes, resulting in higher quality products
• Plan a product backlog and always have visibility into business priority across teams
• Through Planview OpenSuite, leverage tools that their development teams already use for Agile, such as JIRA

A Collaborative Methodology

Agile encourages collaboration, so Planview Enterprise provides the ability to create separate user roles with supporting software features for all participants:

• Product Owners -- document the product vision, develop user stories, and prioritize features
• Customers -- provide input during sprint demos that can be captured as new user stories
• SCRUM Masters and Development Managers -- populate sprint backlog, create story subtasks, update story points, and add developers to stories
• Developers -- make testing notes against stories and report effort for costing purposes
• Resource Managers -- optimize resource utilization across multiple projects and ensure resource availability

Planview Enterprise also provides rich capabilities in the area of project communities. Each project has a community page that includes:

• Project documentation
• Multi-threaded discussions
• Message boards for updates
• Polling functions
• Project analytics

To further enable collaboration, Planview Enterprise supports an integration to Atlassian® JIRA® via the Planview OpenSuite™ interoperability product line. This enables product managers and developers to use their preferred system of record while still communicating effectively to ensure efficiency and productivity.

Plan and Execute Flexibly

Sprints may be planned for whatever duration is determined by each Agile team. User stories can be provided by application or product owners and sub-tasks can include those from developers, testers, and documentation team members to ensure that working software can be delivered on a frequent basis.

And with the flexible project and resource management features in Planview Enterprise, resources can be assigned by function -- Requirements, Reserves, Allocations, and Authorizations -- to accurately block off resource availability for iterations and release planning.

Track Projects Easily

Key Agile information elements to enable your teams to track Agile projects are all part of a standard set of columns available out of the box in Planview Enterprise, allowing users to get started with minimal configuration. These elements include:

• Planned and Earned Story Points
• Story Status
• Team
• Story Number
• Sprint Number
• Sprint Start and Finish Dates

Users can document additional details about each story during sprint planning, including potential unit tests to support test-driven development, to ensure accurate assignment of story points or ideal days. Additionally, content management functions can store notes from sprint retrospectives.

Figure 2. Planview Enterprise for Agile delivers the metrics you need to track and report on progress

Report Success

Finally, the custom reporting dashboards in Planview Enterprise and its OLAP-based reporting solution, Insight Analytics, delivers Agile-oriented reporting functions you need to communicate the project plan, progress against the plan (including velocity metrics and burndown charts), and end-of- iteration reports.