Introducing SoftAgile™ from JamBuster.... or "Why one more Agile Tool?" as an ALM analyst asked.

We at JamBuster Team are very proud to introduce our new Agile Tool, SoftAgile™, over next week!!!

SoftAgile™ was born in a very counter intuitive way.

In 2014, we saw that to build an application required using multiple ALM tools: product or backlog definition tool, project planning, sprint & task management, testing, defect & issue management, release management along with integrations to IDE and SCM tools. It is almost like a ALM quilt made of patchwork of tools!

One of the big challenges with such patchy ALM is that you have to keep on switching between different tools, and thus an integrated view of the project is almost impossible.

So we envisioned an end-to-end agile ALM platform that will have five modules: define product, plan program, develop software, verify quality & customer support. We named it SoftALM^®

We got lot of interest from a software product companies to become our beta partners. And their feedback started to bring polish to our vision of SoftALM^®.

And then it stuck to us that the SoftALM^® is most suitable to either Software Product companies or those who build applications for their businesses and customers, like insurance, banking or e-retailer. The focus here is developing software as a product.

The feedback from our software services beta partner, was of course, by now understandable. They felt SoftALM^® was a bit too product centric for their use.

Service companies and start-ups suggested could we change the focus more to project and customer?

This meant almost taking out product axis and replacing it with customer, project and application focus. This was the birth of SoftAgile™. It is thus counter intuitive that we would built a big Agile ALM platform for product focus, and then carved out a smaller application from it. Of course, SoftAgile™ therefore benefitted from instant enterprise scalability.

Turned out, the SoftALM^® was built so logically that it's transformation to SoftAgile™ was swift. We took about 15 months to build SoftALM^®. SoftAgile™ took only 2 months to be carved out!

So you can see why we built these two tools!

1. To tailor each agile tool as per product (SoftALM^®) vs project (SoftAgile™) focus of end users.
2. To provide integrated applications that provides end-to-end capabilities for either of these end user groups.
3. To provide tighter integration between ALM attributes, that reduces rework and provide total visibility across product and project axes.

Well, when was the last time an Agile ALM software gave you a dashboard that combined your entire project work flow, like our DashFlow™ - the project dashboard in SoftAgile™? This is how we saw integration working for you.

During these 2 years, we discovered an another view of iterative agile-namely improving software through feedback over multiple early and many releases... more like crafting software!!!!

So now you can unleash the power of your agile team to craft your next great software withSoftAgile™!

Take a tour of our SoftAgile™.

Where Does the Agile Gets it Agility?

While we have been dilly dallying moving to agile practices over last few years, early this year we decided that our small product team needs to be fully agile over next 6 months. The last 8 months of transformation has helped us all see whether Agile is as agile as it is made out! We saw 40-50% increase in team velocity over waterfall for the same team!

Waterfall focuses on a release that spans across define, design, develop and verify to develop multiple features in an almost assembly line manner. Agile divides the features into user stories (as if sub-feature) and each of these user stories is defined, designed, developed and verified within one or more iterations by a dedicated scrum team. We discovered that this difference between waterfall and agile manifests to accelerate velocity through following three sources:

A scrum team is functionally complete team that focuses on a few user stories and works towards their completion or achieving the ‘Definition of DONE’ during an iteration or few. For this team, any question that stands as an impediment to DONE becomes a high priority task, not a to-do list item. A dedicated, complete team focused on user story means it gets a detail attention for UI, development, quality and integration, thus reducing rework (which is common when large teams work on large sized efforts).

Thus a focused, dedicated scrum team is the heart and soul that ensures agility of Agile and therefore the first source!

In Agile, the user stories get fully developed and delivered in iterations, while in waterfall, we had to wait until multiple iterations are rolled in a release to have a single feature delivered. Thus agile scales down its focus from features to take an ‘a la carte’ approach of developing user story. This focus on user stories as opposed to feature, adds to project agility as the second source.

Those poor souls harassed by ghost of waterfall projects know well that it is the rework at the end that really burst the project deadlines. The incremental approach of agile provides the opportunity for early customer reviews and hence early inclusion of change requests and early rework, thereby keeping ghost of rework in-check! We also saw, that early feedback seems to invigorate teams to get it DONE and serves as the third source of agility!

Thus, the agility comes from dedicated scrum teams, focus on user stories and less rework due to early feedback! This of course starts from team attitude! Attitude of scrum team to get stories DONE with high velocity and superior quality, with a healthy attitude towards feedback!

- Satish Kamat

jambuster.in

One month to go for the SoftALM launch!

Here at JamBuster, we are very exhilarated as we are speeding towards the commercial release! It has been a month since we launched the Beta version of SoftALM.

By 2011, we had commercialized our in-house project portfolio management tool GDE. By 2013, we were looking for an affordable tool to integrated management of requirements, test cases and defects. When we could not, we saw it as an opportunity to build on our in-house tool these ALM capabilities. Our outsourcing development experience, research on available tools and customer feedbacks on GDE tool, helped us get clarity on what features an ALM tool should essentially have. We named our ALM tool – ‘SoftALM’ for software application lifecycle management.

The Agile methodology, over this time, became a ‘go-to’ strategy for majority of project teams around the globe. For our team. journey of transforming to be truly Agile began 8 months ago. Our team was quick to jump the “Agile” train, as the Agile methodology coincided with our set of principles and practices. Agile practice brought a sense of ownership and empowerment to each team member through interactions to get things ‘Done’! As believers in early involvement of customer, we started talking to them early and got their feedback through alpha and beta candidates. So now we appreciate why Agile philosophy recommends short release cycles. Of course, with our team becoming Agile, SoftALM which started as an ALM tool, quickly turned into an agile ALM tool.

Thus, adopting agile principles was not the most difficult task. Whereas, developing an ALM tool with Agile principles incorporated in it, required some serious analysis, constant conversations with customers and of course, hard-work! Our team and SoftALM have evolved over four internal iterations of software over the past 8 months. After incorporating beta feedback, we are a month away from commercial release slated in early January!

This experience has helped us develop a keen understanding of how to transform to agile especially when years are spent following Waterfall practices. We incorporated all the learnings in SoftALM! Thus SoftALM accommodates both methodologies and takes you through the Agile transformation in a painless way. We endeavor to stand by you through this transformation and make SoftALM your tool to win over agile!

Trying a Free Demo of this software would be a great way to see it yourself: Check it out!

From where does Agile gets its Agility?

While we have been dilly dallying moving to agile practices over last few years, early this year we decided that our small product team needs to be fully agile over next 6 months. The last 8 months of transformation has helped us all see whether Agile is as agile as it is made out! We saw 40-50% increase in team velocity over waterfall for the same team!

Waterfall focuses on a release that spans across define, design, develop and verify to develop multiple features in an almost assembly line manner. Agile divides the features into user stories (as if sub-feature) and each of these user stories is defined, designed, developed and verified within one or more iterations by a dedicated scrum team. We discovered that this difference between waterfall and agile manifests to accelerate velocity through following three sources:


A Scrum team is functionally complete team that focuses on a few user stories and works towards their completion or achieving the ‘Definition of DONE’ during an iteration or few. For this team, any question that stands as an impediment to DONE becomes a high priority task, not a to-do list item. A dedicated, complete team focused on user story means it gets a detail attention for UI, development, quality and integration, thus reducing rework (which is common when large teams work on large sized efforts).

Thus a focused, dedicated scrum team is the heart and soul that ensures agility of Agile and therefore the first source!

In Agile, the user stories get fully developed and delivered in iterations, while in waterfall, we had to wait until multiple iterations are rolled in a release to have a single feature delivered. Thus agile scales down its focus from features to take an ‘a la carte’ approach of developing user story. This focus on user stories as opposed to feature, adds to project agility as the second source.

Those poor souls harassed by ghost of waterfall projects know well that it is the rework at the end that really burst the project deadlines. The incremental approach of agile provides the opportunity for early customer reviews and hence early inclusion of change requests and early rework, thereby keeping ghost of rework in-check! We also saw, that early feedback seems to invigorate teams to get it DONE and serves as the third source of agility!

Thus, the agility comes from dedicated scrum teams, focus on user stories and less rework due to early feedback! This of course starts from team attitude! Attitude of scrum team to get stories DONE with high velocity and superior quality, with a healthy attitude towards feedback!

JamBuster in Singapore

Team JamBuster is enthusiastic to announce two workshops on ‘ Transforming Enterprise for Agile ’ in Singapore, on the 24th and 28th of October. These free agile workshop s will be 4 hour long on each of these days. It is directed at R&D Directors, Product/Program Managers and Agile  Professionals.

The workshops will cover the following topics:

• 1. Discussion and insights shared by Dr. Satish Kamat on Agile and Scaled Agile
• 2. Steps to Transforming Enterprises to Agile
• 3. 

  SoftALM

  ^TM (Tool for 

  Agile Application Lifecycle Management

  ) Demo and Tour
• 4. 

  SoftAgile

  ^TM (Tool for 

  Agile Projects

  ) Demo and Tour
• 5. Free perpetual licenses of SoftAgile^TM and SoftALM^TM for interested small teams

The seats will be limited to aid a healthier and productive discussion. We request all interested professionals to drop us an email on sales@jambuster.in mentioning the name of your company and the attendees.

This will help us to give the attendees a short home work so that we can have a rewarding discussion and a win-win relation with all the attendees! We look forward to an amazing response from Singapore!

Application Lifecyle Management(ALM) vs.SDLC

Application Lifecycle Management(ALM) vs. SDLC

Application Lifecycle Management(ALM) is the journey from idea to a product or an application that is a result of rigorous, collaborative efforts of product owner, system analyst, software developers and testers. Application Lifecycle is an ever iterative and evolutionary process and a crucial one.

The Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is a process of creating or altering software systems, and refers to the models and methodologies that people use. SDLC concept thus underpins different software development methodologies that form the framework for planning and controlling the creation of a software. We have tried to keep the definition of SDLC simple:

Unlike SDLC, which is a one-time process, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, technology development and maintenance. Scrum is the most basic and beneficial way for any organization looking to have Agile Project Management. ALM is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.

ALM should not be confused with SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) as SDLC is a narrower concept. SDLC has its origin and practice in Software Services Industry, specifically with application development focus. SDLC, for example, does not involve product ideation and customer support. Thus, SDLC can be seen as a part of ALM as ALM covers a vast area. A SDLC should end with a Release or Deployment of a commercial version. But ALM spans all iterative releases of various versions made for a particular Software. In short, ALM exists till the Application/Software exists!

This iterative part of lifecycle is illustrated below:

Maximizing the value of the applications we create means doing each and every element of ALM well. Achieving this goal isn’t easy, especially when today’s ALM tools aren’t as well integrated as they need to be. Yet there’s no way around it: Taking a broad, holistic view of ALM is essential for improving this critical business process.

We bring SoftALM^TM , which helps you integrate all the ALM elements with utmost flexibility and ease! It is the result of immense research and experience of working with software product vendors on ALM from Informatics to Telecom sector:

SoftALM TM integrates agile incremental approach for large enterprise teams with customer support and feedback.

Our way of saying: “Welcome to the future of ALM!”

We welcome your feedback or insight. Do visit our Forum to share your thoughts and experience!

How SoftAgile was conceived...

While developing a project management tool for software development projects, we realized the need for requirements, test cases and defects modules, integrated with the project management application. This was the vision with which we started SoftALM  – as the tool for Application Lifecycle Management . That was in the first quarter of the year 2014.

So we built SoftALM with all modules for managing application lifecycle –such as requirements, project planning, test cases and defects. While researching, we realized that even though customer is the very reason for development of software applications, customer feedback was nevertheless the feature that was missed out by most of the ALM software . We decided to fill this gap and empower the customer to provide a feedback. Such feedback could be used as a new feature addition to the Product backlog or as a defect to be fixed or a usability suggestion. This makes SoftALM a complete end-to-end ALM software. We are currently working on integration of SoftALM with version control, configuration and test automation tools, as per feedback got from interactions with ALM professionals.

Further interactions with clients and ALM professionals at the Agile Day Conference  ’14 at Pune and Bangalore brought us to consider the following important points:

• 1. Teams working on small projects or which have a modest product line, will get weighed down by heavy weight, complex ALM tools, and won’t be truly agile!
• 2. Small teams need a lightweight 

  agile project management

   tool aiding continuous delivery, within budgets
• 3. 

  Agile tool

  s in the market currently either are at a very high cost or cover only a part of the development process, requiring one to make patchwork of series of tools

This weighs down the simple Agile development tool, that otherwise should be light and conducive to agile continuous delivery. So a lightweight tool that provide Agile Project Management based on Scrum, virtual Kanban boards, Extreme Programming (XP) and lean practices IS the need of the hour!

With SoftAgile, we intend to provide exactly the same! A simple Agile tool supporting Scrum , XP , Kanban  and Lean practices . We are also looking forward to create an integrated environment for SoftAgile with tool integrations like Microsoft TFS, Jenkins, Jira, Gits, etc.

Come and be Agile with SoftAgile!