Optimizing Your Agile Process


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No matter which stage you are at in your Agile adoption, AccuRev is here to increase your success. This section contains guidance for teams at three different levels.

  • Introducing Agile in Your Organization - Teams looking to begin Agile adoption, by providing comprehensive Agile and deployment services to ensure success in organizations with mixed software development processes.
  • Scaling Agile Throughout Your Enterprise - Organizations that have had success with Agile teams and are now looking to scale Agile processes further as integrated Agile tools can deliver a fast ROI and greatly enhance Agile adoption and success rates.
  • Optimizing Agile in Your Organization - Companies that have had success adopting Agile processes and are now looking to optimize their Agile processes by upgrading their tool suite, and also to fully integrate both Agile and non-Agile teams within the development processes.

In each case, AccuRev is the partner you’ve been looking for. We have a fully integrated Agile tool suite – called AgileCycle – and a complete set of services to support the full spectrum of Agile practices from a single vendor including deployment, integration, Agile coaching, product training, maintenance and support, without the single-vendor lock-in this typically brings.

AgileCycle and Agile Services for All Your Agile Needs

AgileCycle is a fully-integrated Agile Application Lifecycle Management (Agile ALM) solution offering SCM, Agile Lifecycle Management, and Build & Release Management.  AgileCycle incorporates true best-of-breed tools from AccuRev, Rally Software, and UrbanCode/AnthillPro to deliver a comprehensive Agile suite, designed specifically for today’s Agile development teams.  AgileCycle and its associated service offerings save you the time and effort of going it alone and allow you to leverage our years of deep software development process experience and industry partner experience.
Read the AgileCycle Advantages White Paper »

Transition to Agile at Your Own Speed

While AgileCycle is uniquely qualified to support Agile development, it also offers support for other methodologies. You can transition to Agile development all at once or a project at a time. Whatever your choice, you can use AgileCycle to manage, track, and measure all of your software development projects.


Introducing Agile in Your Organization

The best way to get started with Agile is to pick a partner that has all of the tools, expertise, and services you will need to get you from your first steps with Agile to the end of an Enterprise-wide Agile transformation. Here’s a simplified plan for getting to that point:

  • Pick an Agile partner. They will help you get started and even produce a detailed transition plan.
  • Create an Agile transition team and Agile pilot project.
  • Train the transition team and the Agile pilot project.
  • Run an Agile pilot project.
  • Scale and Optimize Agile throughout your organization (see below)

For more recommendations, check out the Agile Resource Center »


Scaling Agile Throughout Your Enterprise

You’ve had success with Agile teams and are now looking to scale Agile processes further. Integrated Agile tools can deliver a fast ROI and greatly enhance Agile adoption and success rates.

Your software development tools may be just like your carpeting. Installed many years ago, coming up at the seams, patched together with scripts, completely out of date, and nearly invisible. Why not maximize the results of your Agile transition by also reconfiguring your development tool stack and transitioning from your existing tool stack to an Agile tool stack?

Evaluate Your Toolset

As you transition to Agile development, many of the components in your tool stack that were helping you do traditional development are now working against you in two ways. First, they aren’t helping you do Agile development well, and second, they are actually working actively against your efforts to be Agile. You may also be missing some support structure that you need and tools that can help you leverage your effort.

Thus a first step is to make sure that you have an Agile tool foundation and actively work to maintain an Agile tool stack. An Agile tool is a tool that supports one or more Agile practices and does so in a way that fits into the overall Agile framework. For instance, a tool which allows you to maintain a ranking of all of the issues that you care about is one that supports the Agile practice of maintaining a backlog. Agile tools must support a high ratio of value to effort in order to fit into the short iterations of an Agile project.

Collocation of Cross-Functional Teams

Setting up an Agile pilot project is relatively straightforward. Setting up a single Agile team which is cross-functional and collocated doesn’t have much of an impact on the overall organization, but moving towards all collocated and cross-functional teams will. Getting many of the benefits of Agile don’t require a wholesale move to collocated cross-functional teams right away, but the closer you can get to the goal, the better off you will be. You may have set up policies and procedures for dealing with a large development team in the traditional development model, relying heavily on your tools to do so, but those same tools are unlikely to provide adequate support for practices that didn’t exist when they were originally installed.

Distributed Agile Development

The short development cycle that results from the short iterations of Agile development requires very close interaction between all participants. Work must be integrated both frequently and rapidly. As a result, when development is taking place at multiple sites, the environment must be set up to give the perception that development is actually taking place at a single site. The obvious solution to this is to use replication.

Some replication solutions require a branch per site. That will not work well in an Agile environment. AgileCycle’s optional replication solution provides high performance for remote users and gives the appearance that all users are working at the same site, thus making distributed Agile Development a practical option. You can also use replication to remove the load of build servers from your main server, thus reducing the impact of continuous integration on overall performance.

Leverage a Best-of-Breed Agile Toolset

AgileCycle provides the following specific features and benefits that aid in scaling Agile:
  • Flexible support for multiple process models which can be changed on the fly as you transition to Agile development and make mid-course adjustments.
  • Best-of-breed Agile software development tools ensure optimal Agile development processes are deployed, as well full compliance with these processes.
  • Complete management visibility of projects throughout the entire development process and into production.
  • Improved team productivity utilizing Agile process and the best available development tools.
  • 100% ROI is typically achieved by teams of 25 to 500 developers in 6 to 12 months.
  • While AgileCycle is uniquely qualified to support Agile development, it also offers support for other methodologies. You can transition to Agile development all at once or a project at a time. Whatever your choice, you can use AgileCycle to manage, track, and measure all of your software development projects.
  • AgileCycle has many built-in features which automate compliance activities. These features include process visualization, change packages, separation of duties, physical security, standards based authentication and authorization, extensible controls, and support for audits.
  • Use of hosting (for APM) and optional replication (for SCM) enable real-time access to data for all users regardless of location.
  • Change packages ensure real change tracking, simplifying the application of your changes to multiple projects and releases.
  • Via AgileCycle’s Continuous Integration system, you can run your build and test pieces in parallel and distribute the load of the many builds typical of Agile development across your entire server farm. AgileCycle will take care of all of the details of dependencies, load balancing, and virtual environment management for fast setup and teardown of test environments.

Learn in-depth about best practices for scaling Agile with Best Practices of Agile Tool Users White Paper »
Learn more about what AgileCycle provides for each role in an Agile organization Click here »


Optimizing Agile in Your Organization

You’ve had success adopting Agile processes and are now looking to optimize those processes by upgrading your tool suite and synchronizing the processes of your Agile and non-Agile teams within the overall development lifecycle of your enterprise. As you scaled (or continue to scale) Agile across your organization, you probably noticed many opportunities to optimize Agile adoption which you were unable to do because your infrastructure held you back.

Unlike other offerings, AgileCycle includes an SCM solution which provides a platform that is the basis for designing, implementing and enforcing your optimal software development process. A cornerstone of Agile development is continuous process improvement through practices such as retrospectives and "stop the line." AgileCycle provides a platform for process optimization and automation that is second to none.

AgileCycle is designed around the philosophy that change is inevitable. In support of this philosophy, everything in AgileCycle is configurable and flexible with good defaults to start from. For example, AgileCycle allows you to re-configure your process model with fast and easy drag-and-drop operations that remove the need for scripting and guesswork.