Agile approach to software development is now on the verge of popularity. According to a recent massive survey conducted by VersionOne only 1 percent of organizations admitted an agile failure, while 95 percent of respondents mention that they are highly satisfied with this approach. Agile adoption rates have grown by 13 percent since November 2013 and now over 24 percent of respondents work in companies who have practiced agile for more than 5 years.
Partial success of this approach and agile-growth can be contributed to the great array of new development tools and technologies. Here are the top-5 most essential ones.
Agilo for Scrum
If you are on the Scrum Masters team, Agilo for Scrum is indispensable. This add-on will automatically update all the key stakeholders on the overall project’s progress and make your team aware of all the latest updates. Project managers will appreciate the “Sprint Report” feature and burn down charts to data mine and govern all the process. Unfortunately, the tool doesn’t support mobile app development projects and you can host just one project at a time, which makes it suitable only for small teams.
QASymphony
qTest by QASymphony is a robust enterprise test management software developed specifically for agile teams. qTest is known for being fully customizable, easy-to-use due to a simple and intuitive interface and integrates with a variety of ALMs such as JIRA as well as automation tools. qTest allows teams to centralize their test case management efforts, create multiple test projects, invite other users, add roles and customize various permissions. Once projects are setup, teams can add requirements, test cases and execute tests to track defects. Additionally, you can easily import existing test cases from Excel files, JIRA and Bugzilla. Teams benefit from real-time reporting to track quality, progress, and productivity for every project. This tool is perfect for streamlining your software testing processes and keeping all test documentation organized.
New Relic
New Relic offers a new level of real-time analytics, which penetrates to the three core aspects of your website’s performance: server monitoring, user monitoring and application monitoring. Application monitoring keeps track of such vital parameter as requests per minute (RPM) for your site; you can easily investigate various parameters related to your web server and lastly, conduct efficient browser monitoring and mine some valuable data on user behavior patterns. You can easily check if certain website components are causing more problems that others, review transaction traces for each server and application and collect data for the slowest individual HTTP requests for access times for each application. If you need a comprehensive web analytics performance tool, New Relic offers one of a kind functionality for this.
Wercker
Wercker is a powerful automated testing tool to help you avoid any potential project bottlenecks. Your development team will appreciate the ability to automatically deploy containers to various destinations; automatic container generation for every commit; instant deployment to popular schedulers such as Marathon, DC/OS and Kubernetes and in general, how simple, the local development can be with this tool.
Slack
Obviously, no agile tools list is good without Slack – arguably the world’s most favorite communication and collaboration tool. It’s extremely easy to use, non-distractive and keeps all the communication neatly organized. Exchanging ideas, reporting on bugs or asking advice on a particular feature is easier than ever! Due to the Slack’s massive popularity, the app now has a lot of cool add-ons and integrations including:
- Screen Hero (recently acquired by Slack) is an integrated screen sharing tool, which allows to actually pair program on someone else’s machine by allowing multiple cursors.
- Marker enables creating and sending annotated screenshots (even with emojis) directly to Slack.
- ai helps you to build a simple conversational chatbot for Slack in under 10 minutes.
- PaperBot will send you a curated list of the best links shared by your team once a day.
- PixelKit is indispensable for your design team. This add-on makes all of your design work searchable, offers a visual version control to your team and integrates with other tools e.g. Dropbox, Google Drive etc.