Agile 2020 Buyer's Guide

Agile Tools A GUIDE FOR BUYERS

SD Times

August 2020

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igital transformation is now more important than ever. It’s a statement that has continued to be stressed and echoed throughout the industry for years, but with organizations now forced to deal with distributed and remote work, there is a new need to reexamine business models, according to Nick Muldoon, co-founder and co-CEO of Easy Agile.

The 14th annual State of Agile report found that distributed teams is the new normal, with 81% of respondents citing that their team members

changing priorities, to improve, and to adapt — all aspects of adopting the Agile mindset.

The roadblocks on the path to true agility Agile challenges are ever-changing depending on the company, team and current business needs. However, there are a few that continue to pose a problem.

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” is one of the first values in the Agile Manifesto, yet people are still focused on processes over

What’s standing in the way of

BY CHRISTINA CARDOZA are not all in the same location. Businesses need to be able find new ways to support and encourage team collaboration, manage changing projects and provide visibility.

“So how can we accelerate change when we know our processes are fundamentally broken?” Muldoon asked. His answer is Agile because it promotes flexibility and transparency businesses so desperately need now in a COVID and post-COVID world. The State of Agile report also found that respondents were using Agile to respond to the current business challenges, manage distributed teams, improve productivity and deliver software faster.

“Agile gives so many companies results. It removes ambiguity from the value being delivered. Where before we couldn’t be sure when a project or new product could be delivered, we can now know with more certainty that a MVP can be shipped and we can receive feedback from customers much earlier,” said Muldoon.

Many organizations already have had Agile practices in place for years and have continued to build upon those practices, but Muldoon explained Agile is an ongoing practice, one that will never get to a phase of “post-Agile.”

Businesses will always have to manage

people, according to Muldoon.

Dan Rice, executive advisor for ValueOps/DevOps at Broadcom’s Rally Software, explained in order to make agility truly work, buy-in has to happen across the entire organization — and it’s easier done when it comes from the top down. “The key areas we see that still hinder the ability to deliver value to customers are generally related to leadership teams not embracing the Agile culture or thinking Agile is just something IT or software delivery teams do,” he said.

Leadership will continue to be a major obstacle unless people in power are willing to relinquish control to the next generation of leaders who were brought up on lean and Agile practices, Muldoon said.

“All too often there are people at the top of companies that are protecting the status quo, the entrenched interests, and themselves. We need to see the servant leaders elevated from people managers to department leads, business unit CEOs, and then the board,” Muldoon explained.

“Quite often the CEOs and board members don’t come from a software background — they come from finance, legal, marketing more often these days, but not IT or software.

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Scarcity versus abundance mindset — anything can be done in software, yet for an accountant it is very clear-cut and regulated,” he continued.

One rising trend to help the organization achieve true agility is to embrace value stream management. VSM is being adopted more and more as a way to connect people, process and technology as well as provide the ability to visualize, measure and deliver business value.

According to Rice, Agile is a key enabler to making all the people and steps involved in the delivery of value a part of

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for long-lived product teams, bringing work to teams instead of bringing teams to work, Agile enables organizations to give customers working software at regular intervals and to facilitate continuous feedback,” he said.

Easy Agile’s Muldoon also sees a trend towards businesses being more customer-focused with the release of SAFe 5.0 for example, which “introduced language around Personas, story mapping sessions, and really bringing empathy for the customer into focus for teams.”

achieving “true agility” the product development process.

A “characteristic of Agile done well is when value streams, all of the people and steps involved in the delivery of value to a customer, are part of the product development process. A key lean principle of Agile is connecting business stakeholders and developers so that they work together daily through the project. Value streams make this a core aspect of an organization’s culture of Agility,” Rice explained.

Another way Rice sees organizations implementing Agile throughout the organization is to incorporate agility into HR functions, encourage autonomy, hire for Agile and culture fit, and provide interactive performance feedback.

Muldoon agreed, adding: “Invest in people; it’s the greatest leading indicator of sustained success. Give them the opportunities to expand the breadth of their experience / role and try new things, cross-pollinating one group with the ideas from another, and making the whole company stronger.”

Rice also sees the need to move from project-based operating models to product-based operating models with a customer-centric approach to make sure teams are building products customers actually want.

“Agile puts the customer and the outcomes they care about most at the center of the products we build. By advocating

August 2020

By focusing on the customer, organizations can react to change and respond at regular intervals, Rice added. Agile “encourages organizations to reflect regularly and become a learning organization so they can constantly improve.”

Muldoon also stressed the importance of playing the long game. While it may be tempting to think short-term to address current needs, a transformation can’t be fast-tracked. “True agility comes after a decade of sustained commitment to the Agile principles,” he said. Thinking needs to go from annual financial goals to long-sustainable growth.

But they also need to be able to quickly pivot based on market changes and feedback from innovators and customers. Rice explained. “Organizations maintaining traditional processes such as identifying investments multiple years in advance and locking in feature roadmaps have worked to their detriment to reaching true agility.”

“When new strategies are identified or experiments fail, organizations must be able to quickly pivot on their strategy, investments and roadmaps so they do not continue down the wrong path,” Rice said.

Digital transformations will “continue forever as the company changes and adapts to an evolving market. Be prepared to stick it out,” Muldoon added. z

Buyers Guide

SD Times

August 2020

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How these companies are solving the pain points of Agile

BY CHRISTINA CARDOZA

Agile tools are only meant to support development tools, not drive the process.

According to Nick Muldoon, co-founder and co-CEO of Easy Agile, instead, development teams should have an evolving set of practices in place that enables them to continuously deliver value to customers.

“That means they may start with a whiteboard, and in the times of COVID graduate to a digital story mapping solution like Easy Agile User Story Maps. Then in later years once they’ve mastered that level of Agile they may shift to Easy Agile Programs which supports a scaled agile transformation,” he explained.

When deciding to put a tool into the mix, that tool should be able to easily and natively integrate with the platform developer teams are comfortable with and already using.

According to Dan Rice, executive advisor for ValueOps/DevOps at Broadcom’s Rally Software, to really be effective an Agile tool needs to offer capabilities needed by teams, teams of teams, programs, portfolios, governance and leadership. So it has to provide a way to visualize work, drive data decisions and minimize the work. “Keeping engineers doing what they love, in the tools they love to do it,” he said. “Tools that require custom views and plug-ins, in addition to many clicks to accomplish a task, may appear to save you money up front but you will spend significantly more in the end in lost productivity.”

Tools can also support teams by enabling them to visualize plans and see whether or not they have unrealistic expectations, and track progress against release

plans, changes and community risks. “Your tool should be flexible enough to allow your teams to work the way they want without constraining visibility of progress across the organization,” Rice said.

The Broadcom Rally solution is an enterprise platform built for scaling agile development practices, while Easy Agile provides Agile applications for building user story maps, personas, roadmaps and programs.

Each solution is designed to solve different pain points of Agile: Muldoon explained Easy Agile is “customer focus made easy.” That’s our mantra.

Collaboration is so important with distributed teams, and Easy Agile apps for Jira solves the problem of ‘taking it off the wall.’ That is, taking the Agile post-it’s, string and paper off the physical wall and digitizing it in Jira.

There is a lot of pain with Agile in that Agile ceremonies are isolated from the delivery of value. However, with Easy Agile Apps for Jira, Story Maps, PI Planning, Roadmapping and Personas can all happen in Jira where the team is already tracking their work.

We aim to make common agile practices remarkably simple. So simple that anyone on the team can get involved.

We’re not creating one monster app to cover many different customers and problem spaces; we are creating apps that focus on one area at a time, and that fit together nicely like a jigsaw puzzle to provide a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts.

According to Broadcom’s Rice, Rally is used as organizations look to scale Agile beyond the development team. Rally helps reduce the complexity of planning and execution across teams from the entire organization.

Some examples include: Rally enables organizations to easily visualize and track all of the work being delivered without the need for custom boards and views. With Rally’s Organizational Hierarchy, it is easy to quickly tie strategic initiatives to program and agile team planning and execution, allowing for a clear understanding of priorities and progress.

Rally’s Capacity Planning functionality allows an organization to easily model team and delivery group capacity against planned work so that organizations can create achievable plans and feel confident in commitments, building trust while identifying and understanding risks and issues that could have an impact on those commitments.

Rally’s robust Dependency and Risk Management capabilities help you quickly visualize and understand cross-team, program and portfolio dependencies, including misalignments and potential impacts to your plans without the need for complex plug-ins, queries or views.

Rally’s Release and PI Tracking functionality allows you to visualize progress against release and PI plans, so that you understand when scope change may put plans at risk. This helps facilitate the right conversations, enabling you to steer work effectively across all teams and delivery groups involved in a release or PI. z

SD Times

August 2020

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A guide to Agile development tools n Axosoft’s agile project management software is based on the Scrum methodology and designed to help teams plan, track and release software. It features a release planner to view capacities of the sprint, team and team members; interactive Kanban boards to customize and edit item cards and work logs; and custom dashboards with an overview of velocity and projected ship date. n Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s suite of DevOps tools that agile teams can utilize to plan, track and discuss work as well as use Scrum-ready and Kanban-capable boards.

Other features include Azure Pipelines for CI/CD initiatives, Azure Boards for planning and tracking, Azure Artifacts for creating, hosting and sharing packages, Azure Repos for collaboration and Azure Test Plans for testing and shipping. n Blueprint Storyteller helps make sense of complex agile software development initiatives by aligning business strategy and compliance with IT execution. The solution tackles app development, regulatory compliance, requirements management and software modernization. n Digital.ai is a leading platform provider for Value Stream Management, Agile planning, DevOps and source code management. Its offerings provide global enterprise and government industry leaders a cohesive solution that enables them to ideate, create and orchestrate the flow of value through continuous delivery pipelines with measurable business outcomes. n GitLab is a single application built for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle. Agile teams can use GitLab to plan and manage projects with features like issue tracking and boards, task lists, epics, roadmaps, labels, and burndown charts. GitLab supports SAFe, Spotify, Disciplined Agile Delivery and more. n Inflectra’s enterprise agile program management solution SpiraPlan features one place to keep track of all activities, trackable planning boards and dashboards, a test management platform, and customizable workflows. In addition, SpiraTeam lets teams manage entire project life cycle from requirements and tests to tasks and code.

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FEATURED PROVIDERS n

n Broadcom: Rally Software is an enterprise-class agile management platform purpose built for scaling agile across the enterprise. It enables businesses to make faster and smarter decisions by aligning work with business objectives. Rally provides a central hub for teams across the organization to collaborate, plan, prioritize and track work, and continuously improve. Rally also enables teams to accurately measure their results with roll-ups of progress, dependencies, alignment and plan health statistics. To learn more visit https://www.broadcom.com/rally. n Easy Agile: Easy Agile is an Australian software technology business focused on helping teams be more effective. We create agile apps for Atlassian’s Jira platform; Story Maps, Roadmaps, Programs and Personas. Easy Agile is built on strong values of work/life/community balance. We pledge 1% of our time and profit back into the community. n Jama Software centralizes upstream planning and requirements management in the software development process with its solution, Jama Connect. Product planning and engineering teams can collaborate quickly while building out traceable requirements and test cases to ensure development stays aligned to customer needs and compliance throughout the process. n Micro Focus ALM Octane is an enterprise DevOps Agile management solution designed to ensure high-quality app delivery. It includes Agile tools for team collaboration, the ability to scale to enterprise Agile tools, and DevOps management. n Perforce Hansoft is an enterprise Agile project planning and management tool. It enables organizations to plan, track, and manage progress of large-scale, multi-element development projects while using their preferred delivery methods (Agile, Waterfall, & hybrids.) Hansoft is perfect for managing dispersed teams, expanding scale, changing goals, and tight schedules. n Pivotal Tracker is a Agile project management solution that offers stories to define projects, automatic planning to keep teams moving, workspaces to organize projects, and analytics to see how teams and projects are functioning. n Planview’s Enterprise Agile Planning solution enables organizations to adopt and embrace Lean-Agile practices, scale Agile beyond teams, practice Agile Program Management, and better connect strategy

to Agile team delivery while continuously improving the flow of work and helping them work smarter and deliver faster. n The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is the leading framework for scaling Agile across the enterprise. It is designed to help businesses deliver value on a regular and predictable schedule. It includes a knowledge base of proven principles and practices for supporting enterprise agility. n Targetprocess: To connect portfolio, products and teams, Targetprocess offers a visual platform to help you adopt and scale Agile across your enterprise. Use SAFe, LeSS or implement your own framework to achieve business agility and see the value flow through the entire organization. n Tasktop Integration Hub connects the network of best-of-breed tools used to plan, build, and deliver software at an enterprise-level. As the backbone for the most impactful Agile and DevOps transformations, Tasktop enables organizations to define their software delivery value stream, and enables end-to-end visibility, traceability and governance over the whole process. n TechExcel recently announced the release of Agile Studio, a new Agile development platform that provides out-of-thebox support for all major Agile methods and consists of three major Agile development tools: DevTrack, DevPlan and KnowledgeWise. z