Tasktop

Planning tools form an integral part of any software project and picking a good planning tool can be critical to success.  But for teams working in large enterprises it isn’t as simple as picking which planning tool they think is best.  In large enterprises, a significant part of many projects involves integration between heterogeneous systems, and planning in that context becomes an exercise in integration as well.  With requirements in one system and defects in another, planning can be tedious and seeing the larger picture difficult.

Imagine you’re ScrumMaster for a team in a large company that uses HP ALM’s Agile Accelerator for release planning.  Your company has just acquired a small start-up and your next release will involve full scale integrations with that company’s existing products. They’ve spent the last couple of years building up a product backlog in Rally and have a good amount of historical data to track velocity.  The tools are familiar to them and have become part of the routine for developers in their daily work and during scrum meetings so you don’t want to disrupt their productivity by switching tools.

But the new phase of development involves integrating products that have issues and defects being tracked in two completely different systems.  With the timelines and deliverables now intertwined, trying to plan across these two different systems is proving to be difficult because it’s not easy to see the dependencies between the two systems.

Tasktop has recognized that for many teams the choice of planning tools may be largely determined by existing infrastructure in the organization, and that the next generation of planning support will embrace and flow with the differences in that infrastructure, rather than try to enforce sameness.

So how does Tasktop make Agile planning work in this kind of environment?   The Tasktop Planner provides an extra level of flexibility in planning by allowing you to mix plans from different repositories.  You can have your user stories and sprints in Rally, your defects in HP Quality Centre, and still be able to plan everything in one place.
Tasktop Planner provides a unified interface for planning across different systems and lets you create associations between those systems.  And you can do all of this right from within your development environment where it’s possible to navigate from a user story in one system to a defect in another to a line of code in your IDE.

To help you fully harness the power of Tasktop’s Agile Planning, I will be offering a free webinar on cross-repository Agile planning:

In this webinar, I will explain why it is so important to have Agile tools be able to reach across repositories to be truly usable by companies. I will then demonstrate how Tasktop’s cross-repository Agile planning works highlighting how sub-tasks in a user story or on a Scrum board can have dependencies on issues from other systems. I will also highlight how all of this information can be available from within the Eclipse IDE as well as in an offline manner.

To learn more about the Tasktop Planner and how it can help bridge the gap between heterogeneous plans download an evaluation copy of Tasktop Enterprise or sign up for the webinar: