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!

Why & what should Executives know about ALM?

Software product and services companies executives are involved in envisioning, developing, marketing and selling software or services around it. Here is why ALM needs their executive championship!

ALM provides a framework for managing application lifecycle as namesake.  It essentially begins with customer feedback or requests on some capabilities or techno or marketing realizing an opportunity to automate some processes or improving current capabilities, essentially to develop a new software application.  The Marketing team or like then conceptualizes the product as features and requirements, most times working externally with customers, internally with technology and customer support to define value proposition or differentiation.  Design and development iterations follow. Verification team then traces behavior of the software against requirements laid out.  The defects, improvements are done and software is released to customers. Customers use it, report functional defects and usability challenges. These gets fixed and released, with newer features in next iteration of the cycle.

This application lifecycle thus requires many shake hands across multi-functional team, involves numerous qualitative situations with go / no-go decisions, and even when some data is available it makes sources of challenges. This if not managed well, can act as serious stress causing agents for your team and at worst result into a fractured team that can go pear-shaped at delivering a quality software on time and under budget. 

A well-defined ALM can provide framework for managing application lifecycle as namesake while facilitating the use of software tool for visibility and transparency, application of standards for each phase of lifecycle and result into efficient quality development. 

Executives are best suited to champion the need for developing, implementing and continuous improvement of an ALM framework that defines roles and responsibilities, empowers the team and brings focus on quality delivery, on time and under budget.

Current SoftALM combines JamBuster's experience of starting from waterfall software development lifecycle model, trying to use it with teams on multiple continents, and then moving to agile philosophy.  We then tried using tapestry of commercial applications to find out, they only partially covered ALM needs. Hence we began developing a flavor of application lifecycle management model, best practices and software tools that leverage agile for software enterprises.

SoftALM from JamBuster provides a process framework, best practices and the single tool for end-to-end management of the process with complete visibility.  The SoftALM process model focuses on creating a dream team that has ownership, deep knowledge of their products and pride in their expertise and work.  The processes, best practices and software tool are optimized to facilitate a predictive, high quality software delivery with in budget and on time! What more can we ask for in an ALM software?

JamBuster at Agile Day Conference

It has been an amazing year at JamBuster. SoftALM, the only end-to-end Agile tool to manage application lifecycle management for enterprises, was showcased at the Agile Day Conference held on 18th and 25th of July at Pune and Bangalore respectively. SoftALM has received an overwhelming response at the conference. Getting to interact with professionals from the field of Agile helped us get some impressive inputs. What was surprising is that the enterprises using some of the biggest names in the application lifecycle management tool market were  not able to get what they wanted - a simple and lightweight tool that is user friendly while allowing the enterprise to go fully agile!  We were very sure that SoftALM would get a phenomenal response as it catered to the most important part of the challenges that enterprises faced. 

Dr. Satish Kamat's experience of working with technology teams spanning continents, over a decade lead to a vision of a tool that was lightweight, customizable and induced agility and speed. Ofcourse the result is SoftALM, the rest is history! We have been on a continuous ride to improvement and the won't settle for anything less than excellence. 

So we want to be able to address your enterprise needs when it comes to managing the application lifecycle in an end-to-end manner and let you do what you do best- develop high quality software that wins your customers for decades to come! Do take a free trial on Softalm.jambuster.in and let SoftALM take your Agile Application Lifecycle Management to the next level!  We welcome Agile Enterprises of the future who are looking for transformation.

Take the free demo to find more or get in touch!

Discovering Agile Application Lifecycle Management

When I was researching Agile Application Lifecycle Management, I realized that there is no standard definition of it. About 80 to 100 vendors offer 500+, what they call “Agile ALM solutions or part of their ALM offerings”. Most of these offerings differed from each other in terms of their focus and what they thought an ALM should be like! Some focused on Product and Project Management, others on Software Development and Delivery.

Few of the prominent ones focused on providing a solution that could speedup quality delivery but missed out on an important part of ALM which was Customer Support! For Example: HP’s ALM solution leverages its niche ‘Quality Center’, Atlassian’s focus being ‘Defect Management’, Microsoft combines VS’s ‘Code Development’ with TFS and SmartBear built their ALM complete by combining DevComplete and QAComplete.

And we, being a Agile software product company realized that it isn’t really possible to stay ahead of the game if you are lacking in product support! That’s when Team JamBuster, having an experience of managing 100 + outsourcing projects worldwide, realized the need for a truly end-to-end solution for the market of Software App Lifecycle Development which would change the market dynamics. 

We observe from our vantage point that vendors get the software firms to make a quilt or patchwork of their applications that would help manage the App Lifecycle. This complex juggling between tools makes it even more difficult to collaborate and deliver projects before deadlines.

We are launching SoftALM™ to bring the focus on Agile ALM, instead of having to maintain and integrate a bunch of software to manage your ALM! Just have one software doing it for you at one fourth the cost! Achieve an Integrated Management of Product, Project, Software, Quality and Support all on a single platform. 

Sounds good??

Contact us at info@jambuster.in to get a Free Demo on your computer or smartphone and experience how SoftALM ™ works its magic on your App Development Lifecycle!