| VersionOne Seeks to Make Agile Planning More Predictable | | Print | |
| Thursday, 24 January 2008 | |
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Over the past year, agile software development planning tool provider VersionOne has striven to add strategic planning features to make agile more enterprise-ready and governance-friendly. Now it’s trying to reconcile the complexity that results when you scale out a product with a return to the simplicity for which agile development is supposed to promote, while adding more decision support to its recent strategic planning add-ons.
The new version 8.0 adds an Intelligent Release Forecasting feature that applies what-if analysis to strategic planning. That is, a project manager inputs key project parameters, such as velocity (the rate at which story points, a measure of functionality used in agile development, are completed) to predict release date. In fact, it is a simplification of project burndown techniques that agile development professionals such as scrum masters already employ when they plot project progress. (Burndown as the progress that is made in “burning down" the backlog of stories that have been assigned.) The new forecasting features build atop strategic planning features released last summer , where you enter goals and track which features or stories align with them; and a related feature that tracks which developers are assigned to which stories. VersionOne added that in response to a common complaint about agile development, that it emphasizes short term planning at the expense of long-term goals. Additinally, VersionOne's 8.0 release extends one-click navigation to more major features, simplifying navigation of a tool that is otherwise adding more choices to the menu.             |
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