How to optimize working processes
Today there are lots of products for project management. Most of them can be tailored to suit different teams. But there is software that was originally developed to manage the development process and find bugs, for example, Jira.
Many people think that popular software can only be used in big corporations, and often small development teams of up to 10 people or even less who are just getting acquainted with the basics of project management, prefer simple tools like Trello or stay in Google Sheets.
Well, such giants as ServiceNow or HP Service Desk are often irrelevant for small development studios, because they usually have a high price tag and many additional features that may not be necessary for them.
What does an agile developers team need for comfortable and productive work?
- Well planned workflow
- Tracking small stages of work and bugs
- Invite other specialists, for example, designers and testers, regardless of their location
- Mobility (the ability to log in from different devices, so that it does not take a lot of time)
Jira
A well-known project management tool that was originally invented for bug tracking.
Project management
Development teams that want to follow basic agile principles need a well planned and organized workflow. By this, it’s possible to manage all steps of the development process, plan releases without breaking the work.
Jira has different built-in models of workflow, starting from the basic “to do – in progress – done”. You can choose the template you need and use it without editing, or add some more steps.
Step by step work
By the time all in the team chose the main and additional stages of the development process of their product, then the real work starts.
Jira has Scrum and Kanban boards (like Trello), where users can add cards with the following tasks. All small tasks can be united into big epics that represent main pieces of work.
There’re also dashboards which represent all necessary information and reports.
Another feature of Jira Software is roadmaps to plan the future strategy of product development and inform everyone about what’s going on at the moment.
It’s all about agility
Jira Software fits different teams. You can create special groups for users and invite them to several tasks all together or separately. Users can leave comments, mention other specialists, and attach files right in the task card.
Jira Query Language is a built-in search language that saves precious minutes while searching necessary data – you only need to type the request into the search box.
Jira can be integrated with other Atlassian products, including those for developers (Bitbucket, Bamboo, FishEye, and others), similar software (ServiceNow, Zendesk, and others), and third-party services (GitHub, Jenkins, Docker, and others). You can also broaden Jira functionality by thousands of addons from Atlassian Marketplace.
Price
Jira is free for the teams up to 10 users and 250 GB of storage. For more users, Atlassian offers Standard licensing for 7$ per user per month.
Rally (CA Agile Central)
Another agile tool for project management for releases and iterations planning and managing other useful features for QA.
Tune it for your team
Rally can also be integrated with GitHub, Zapier, and Bitbucket. They also offer reliable customer support services and a set of training videos for users.
Like in Jira, Rally also lets users create customizable dashboards with all needed information about the project. There are no roadmaps and built search language.
Only for developers
Rally is not as flexible as Jira Software. If Jira can be used for many teams with different projects, Rally is mostly for developers teams.
Price
Rally Starter Edition is free and is tailored for teams up to 50 users.
What to choose
Jira and Rally have a similar set of functionalities.
Compared with Rally, Jira is easier to use, as it is not overwhelmed with a big amount of settings that the team may never use at all. If you need integration with other tools, for Jira there are more ready solutions to integrate it with many popular tools and software. Jira functionality can be also broadened by addons, for example, to track the work log or to export files.
Rally is more difficult to adapt to other specialists’ work. If you need more specific functionality, you’ll have to look for more sophisticated solutions, as it doesn’t provide a wide range of integrations with other tools and addons. Before starting work with Rally, you also need to watch a set of training videos, because it might seem too complicated for new users.
It doesn’t matter which side you are on — we will help you comfortably switch to any software.
Even a small team of developers cannot do without the right software. Contact our experts, and we’ll find an optimal solution for you.
