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Five Criteria for Choosing

Enterprise Agile Development Software

Agile software development is a requirement for any modern and adaptive development organization that

wants to employ a dynamic product-lifecycle strategy. According to recent research, the percentage of

companies embracing agile methodologies for digital product production has now surpassed those using

offerings available, the issue is not whether there is a tool that can enhance your organizational performance,

but how to select the right Agile tool for your needs.

If your team is considering an Agile software development platform—such as Atlassian Jira, Atlassian Jira

Align (formerly Agilecraft), Rally from Broadcom, Microsoft Azure DevOps, or VersionOne ALM—you should

consider these five criteria before making a decision regarding your vendor:

1. Is the platform intuitive and ease to use by both technical and non-technical users?

2. Does the platform empower agile teams to meet their current and emerging needs?

3. Does the platform support cross-functional contextual communication and collaboration?

4. Does the platform support robust visibility into the entire project lifecycle, from planning to project delivery?

limits the wide-spread adoption of a platform and often indirectly causes teams to adopt multiple tools

while trying to satisfy the original project and work management need. The use of multiple tools can often

create disparate data, fragmented workflows, and prevent a single view into development environments

for peers and leadership. Additionally, with increasing demands on modern businesses to quickly deploy

applications, you will want an agile management solution that can be configured and maintained without

extensive customizations or costly administrative overhead.

2. Does the vendor’s platform empower agile teams to meet their current and emerging needs? Does

the vendor’s platform support multiple different work methodologies, including hybrid work, and best support

how the customer company operates? Or, does the vendor force customers into specific agile methodologies?

Does the vendor have robust agile functionality to support the full planning, resourcing, and delivery of a

work and conform methodologies to specific needs and custom processes.

The platform you choose should also facilitate a collaborative and coordinated approach to team and

release planning at the iteration, program, and portfolio levels. The platform should support collaborative,

in-platform capacity and scenario-planning capabilities—allowing users to create “what-if” scenarios—

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and provide the ability to model backlogs, teams, capacity, and portfolio items to team allocation for a

given release.

3. Does the solution support cross-functional contextual communication and collaboration? Does

goals, project changes, deadlines, and project blockers. Communication outside the context of a task or

project can result in the need for real-time meetings to resolve uncertainties, or worse, unforeseen

roadblocks in completing a task item.

4. Can the platform support robust visibility into the entire project lifecycle from planning to

delivery? Does it facilitate realistic and collaborative planning with visibility into works in progress and

portfolio allocations by peers, project managers, and leadership?

Teams need to have visibility into work across the entire organization to avoid the duplication of work

and to manage work items and cross-team dependencies. Team members need to understand how

dependencies might impact the individual, team, or project work plan, so being able to visualize

dependency scheduling errors and monitor the resolution of dependencies throughout the entire process

also reduce the frequency of requests by eager business leaders into project completion status.

5. Does the vendor support the customer’s ability to align project worth to business strategy and

company goals? Does the vendor link the work of agile teams to the company’s enterprise portfolio and

overall strategy to ensure broader alignment?

Effective agile management is more than just managing projects effectively. Effective agile platforms

link the work of agile teams to the enterprise portfolio and business strategy to deliver projects that

contribute to the company’s bottom line. Agile management solutions that do not align projects to

business strategies are only providing part of the needed functionality to be an effective, modern agile

management platform.

To better identify how five agile software development management solutions—Atlassian Jira, Atlassian Jira

Align, Rally from Broadcom, Microsoft Azure DevOps and VersionOne ALM—Apprize 360 interviewed

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1. Ease of use: Rally features a drag-and-drop user interface with an intuitive and agile-centric UI,

allowing users to get started quickly without extensive training. Unlike other solutions, Rally supports

a wide range of agile processes without extensive customizations, a complication that can inhibit use

and create ongoing management problems.

2. Empower agile teams to meet their current and emerging needs: Rally supports traditional project

taking best practices of multiple methodologies to create a framework that works best for your

company. Other platforms require you to fully adopt a single proprietary agile methodology, locking

you into a framework and process that may not be best for your team and company. Rally meets both

breakdowns with threaded chat and a team inbox that aggregates email, feeds, and tool notifications

all in one place. Rally provides several ways for a team to communicate and collaborate on shared

work. Depending on working agreements, a team may choose to collaborate using fields inside work

items, apps, shared page views, shared pages and apps, or a combination of these options.

4. Robust visibility of the entire project lifecycle from planning to delivery: One of Rally’s top

differentiators is its ability to flow data from multiple levels in an organization. From the portfolio,

program, and team levels and back up to the PMO and business leaders, Rally provides complete

visibility & traceability across tasks, work items, projects, and portfolios. Rally supports business

cases and provides visualization of strategic plans in a timeline view, including roadmap visibility. The

Rally Capacity Planning page allows users to envision the completion of the right work, and the Team

a release or add tasks to address actions related to the risk. The platform displays cross-team

dependencies visually on the Team Planning page and provides the ability to view both predecessor

and successor dependencies associated with work items as well as the number of dependencies.

5. Alignment to Business Strategy: Rally was one of the few platforms that linked projects to business

objectives. Modern agile platforms need the ability to support the accurate roll-up of data across

teams and projects, from user stories up to investment themes, and to allow data to be used to drive

effective decision making. Other vendors lack the ability to provide visibility across all work within

their respective platforms and easily report on project status, progress, budget status, and alignment

to business strategy.

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