How often has this happened to you: You finish up some work on the last day of the iteration, forget to update the task status and go home, happy at a job well done. You turn up the next day and realise you didn’t update a bunch of stuff. Now what?
If you’re using a paper chart: Just make the changes now, update the burndown and calculate the velocity. Simple!
What if you are using a tool? Ahh, suddenly you are in a bit of a pickle. If you change the estimates for the tasks, they will be timestamped at the current time. This means the estimate is not taken into consideration for the burndown and velocity calculation for the previous iteration. Your taskboard may even show the wrong status. Arrgh!!
This simple example is a perfect illustration of one of the big advantages that a simple paper chart can have over a tool – the ability to fudge data (in a good way). Many tools give endless grief when you want to do something simple that goes against the ‘rules’ of the tool.
So, its with some excitement that I want to announce a new feature in Silver Catalyst – the ability to change estimates in the past. Forgetting to update an estimate, and then seeing the burndown and velocity wrong for a just concluded iteration is something that happens to every team once in a while and we really wanted to support the flexibility that the paper tool gives you in this regard.
CHENNAI—12 May, 2009—Silver Stripe Software Pvt Ltd announced the release of Silver Catalyst, a project management tool that helps distributed teams execute Agile projects. The recent recession in the global economy has caused many IT companies to adopt Agile software project management methodologies as a way to better satisfy customers.
Agile methods are new ways to develop software that have quickly grown in popularity in Europe and the US. These processes use rapid project cycles, enabling companies to be more responsive to market needs, while improving quality and return on investment.
“Agile methodologies work best when there are high levels of communication and visibility between stakeholders and the team. Teams that are globally distributed find it difficult to execute agile projects due to reduced communication and visibility across locations” said Siddharta Govindaraj, Founder and Director of Silver Stripe Software.
Siddharta added, “Indian companies are increasingly faced with offshore and globally distributed Agile projects. Silver Catalyst is the first Agile tool to be created in India, targeted specifically to help these companies collaborate with their customers and deliver on challenging distributed agile projects”
Silver Catalyst allows teams to view and update agile project plans in real time from any location and provides a unified view of the project for team members, stakeholders and customers. Other benefits of Silver Catalyst include support for key Agile specific metrics and executive dashboards that allow managers to track progress across multiple projects.
Silver Catalyst is available in online and on-site versions. For more information on Silver Catalyst and to sign up for a trial, visit http://www.ToolsForAgile.com
About Silver Stripe Software Pvt Ltd:
Silver Stripe Software is a startup based in Chennai that is a leading Indian provider of agile software development tools. Our goal is to solve complex software delivery problems with elegant solutions. Our product, Silver Catalyst, enables agile teams to execute globally distributed projects.
How fast can you create 3 stories (features), create an iteration, schedule them, break them into tasks, assign, estimate and move the tasks through the lifecycle? Think it’ll take a long time? Think again.
In our opinion, an easy to use agile tool should clock in at under 3 minutes on this challenge – one minute for each user story. Any longer and its just too time consuming for day to day agile usage. Users who have to sit through the tool everyday will wither work around the tool or login sporadically and perform big batch updates, both of which defeats the purpose of a tool.
Silver Catalyst clocks in at 2 minutes 15 seconds. It could have been faster, if assignment and estimate was entered while creating tasks, but the idea was is to try to mimic real development where someone picks up a task later.
Ease of use in agile tools for day to day operations is a big sticking point, and it would be nice to raise awareness through more such videos. Try out the challenge with your favourite tool, upload your videos and put the link with the timing in the comments. Looking forward to checking out the videos
See Silver Catalyst do the Agile Tool Challenge in this video below.
One of the big features of the on-site edition of Silver Catalyst is the ability to integrate with various third party tools. If you’ve wanted to see these integrations in action, then these videos are for you. These videos demonstrate Silver Catalyst’s integration with Subversion, Wikis and Trac. Check them out below. Continue reading ‘Silver Catalyst Integration with Subversion, Wiki and Trac’ »
