Agile method for software development is finding its way to the top, thanks to the rise in agile adoption by a large majority of organizations. According to recent surveys, it have been found out that only very few companies have reported an agile failure while others are fully satisfied with the approach.
The new efficient development tools available in the market are of course, one of the main reasons for the success of the approach and the increase in agile-adoption. Nowadays, there is a great array of tools available; but, only the best ones can give expected results. Here’s a list of developer’s favourite tools for agile development:
1. Atlassian Jira
Jira is one of the top tools used for software development management. It enables the development team to create, manage and to report on almost every detail of agile development, thereby, helping them work in an organized manner. The Jira add-ons make it easy to plan important agile strategies, which include developing user stories, creating sprint backlogs and looking into team activities. Jira isn’t meant for every development team out there. A financially strong company that is capable of customising Jira according to their needs gets to see Jira’s power and flexibility.
2. Axosoft OnTime Scrum
This tool helps development teams manage backlogs, releases and sprint. Axosoft OnTime Scrum, that is HTML5-based, comes with burndown charts and a management dashboard. It also tracks the time required for coding and to fix bugs. The tool is a part of Axosoft’s OnTime platform that comes with other collaborative tools like wiki and bug tracker for effective agile development.
3. qTest
qTest is a powerful enterprise management software meant specifically for agile teams. It can be fully customized depending on the needs of the development team and is easy to use, thanks to its simple interface. qTest can also be integrated with different ALMs like JIRA and also with different automation tools. It allows the software testing processes to be executed smoothly and to organize testing documentation. The development team can add requirements, easily manage test cases and execute the tests to look for defects once the project is set up. You can also import existing test cases into the software to run. The best part of qTest is that it’s real-time reporting helps teams keep track of the quality, progress and productivity of the project.
4. Telerik TeamPulse
Telerik TeamPulse is a project management tool that is based on agile best practices. It helps the development team manage the code and bugs. Telerik TeamPulse understands agile projects and thereby helps the development team to gather the requirements and strategies by helping to plan, schedule and to track the progress of the project. In this way, it serves as a medium to share information regarding the project with every team member. It also comes with a Best Practices Analyzer, which is a rules-based tool that automatically checks the TeamPulse quality.
5. AgileZen
AgileZen doesn’t support every aspect of agile development. Instead, it focuses on just the important elements involving kanban. AgileZen is one of the low-cost tools available that helps your team develop software in a more organized manner while tracking the progress of the team members and the overall project.
6. Planbox
It is an agile project management tool that allows collaboration of people from different business functions to strategize and deliver projects successfully. Planbox helps bring software development and other functions of an organization into the agile life cycle. It is in fact a hosted web application that introduces four levels of project management: Initiatives, Projects, Items (or stories) and tasks. Though Planbox was initially meant for agile users alone, it is used by creative agencies, startups for purposes such as web designing.
7. Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server
Team Foundation Server or TFS as it is called, that supports different aspects of application management that includes source code management, requirements management, project management, reporting, automated builds, lab management, testing and release management capabilities. It can be used as a back-end server when it comes to collaboration of development environments.
8. Rally
This is a cloud-based agile lifecycle management platform that comes with various custom pages and dashboards, and helps automate various development processes. The software is meant of organizations, large to small, that adopt agile methodology for software development. Rally comes with in-built applications. It can also be collaborated with JIRA, Confluence, Jenkins, Eclipse, Subversion, three Microsoft TFS solutions and many other products, thus allowing the development teams to manage their projects better.
