Compared to traditional software development life cycle, agile methodology helps to respond to unpredictability of software development process through incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints. To implement agile in a distributed development scenario, the software development team need an effective agile solution that provides configurability thereby allowing teams to incorporate any organizational need that go beyond the definition of SCRUM and Agile methodology.

1. Attain Configurability with an Effective Agile Solution
Compared to traditional software development life cycle, agile methodology helps to respond to
unpredictability of software development process through incremental, iterative work cadences, known
as sprints. To implement agile in a distributed development scenario, the software development team
need an effective agile solution that provides configurability thereby allowing teams to incorporate any
organizational need that go beyond the definition of SCRUM and Agile methodology. Here is a look at
the artifacts/entities/ objects supported by a best of the breed agile solution and its important
features.
 Projects – contains multiple Releases
 Releases – contains multiple Sprints
 Sprints – With multiple durations from 1 week to 6 weeks
 Product Backlogs – Categorized as Epic, Features, User stories
 Daily Scrum Meeting – In a distributed development, daily SCRUM meeting happens remotely
even sometime asynchronously. The agile solution helps to capture all the major meeting
aspects.
 Test Cases – Implementing more traditional Test Management approaches integrated with agile
methodology to enforce testing of selected Product Backlog by Traceability Relations.
 Issues/ Changes – a complete Issues management solution integrated with agile
methodology including custom visual issues process design and implementations
Traceability Relationships
With its Requirements Traceability matrix and relations, feature linking can be done between User
Stories, between User Stories and other Backlog items, Sprints and Risks.
Versioning Backlog Items
It has a built-in versioning and implicit & explicit locking mechanism. Built-in versioning allows tracking
of all previous versions, comparison between two versions, a version diagram to show the progression,
cloning of artifacts, branching and merging of versions.
Collaboration
Its collaborative ranking tool allows multiple users to rate each backlog item in a 1 to 10 scale against
various business values. Based on various ratings from multiple users, it automatically calculates a
normalized score for each Backlog that can be used for prioritizing Backlog.
Multi-threaded Discussions among the Stakeholders
A primary activity of any team is to make a series of decisions based on comments and opinions of its
members. Multi-threaded discussions allow one to capture a complete history (and hence the
intellectual property) of the decision making process.
Automation
Using a drag-and-drop graphical designer, an agile process can be designed, implemented, enforced
and automated. The process will automatically create Tasks for one or more users based on Roles they
play. When the tasks are completed, the process creates a new set of tasks for a new set of users.
Reporting
It includes multiple reporting engines - HTML, Crystal, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Both textual
and graphical metric reports can be displayed on custom dashboards. Each user can have several
custom dashboards based on his/ her role.

2. Custom Fields
It helps to create a large number of custom fields of various types for all entities, including User
Stories.
Thus, with agile solutions from top notch service providers specializing in application lifecycle
management , help enterprises to carry out software development process easily and effectively.
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