Agile product development and collaboration tools
At Maruti Techlabs we have teams working on different projects and clients from all over the world. Thus we require a right set of product development and collaboration tools to keep our team focused, organized and on task. We believe just because you’re in a different city or even time zone doesn’t mean you can’t still communicate and work together as if you were in the same room. We are using various tools to keep our CXOs, team and customers connected and productive from locations around the world. These tools help us in information sharing, process automation and project management.
Here are some of the favorite tools of Maruti Techlabs –
Team Collaboration Tool
Slack
An year back we were using different tools for internal communication – Gmail, Hangout, Convo. It was really confusing to communicate with substantial switchover time among the tools. Then we started using Slack for communicating internally and sometimes with our client. Soon we became a big fan of it!! It allows you to easily manage your team conversations in open channels, and you can make new channels for teams, members, topics or projects. Some of its features include – @mention people (similar to Twitter) to call things to their attention in a private message or on one of the “channels.” You can also search chat history and star important messages. It has a user-friendly interface, and you barely need any training to start communicating and collaborating with your team.
Slack – Birthday wishes, Burger talks and technical updates
Each team at Maruti Techlabs has their own channel where they can communicate about work progress, share knowledge, solve problems, let the team know if they are running late. We use Slack for those quick questions we have to help eliminate unnecessary emails. It’s also a good tool to use to chat about non-work related things and have some fun with your team (including custom emojis)! We also leverage integrations to automatically pull information and activity from outside tools into Slack. An Asana integration keeps everyone informed about new and pending tasks, while a Twitter integration informs the team any time there’s a @Marutitech mention (so they can stay engaged with their community) and JIRA integration for client collaboration and to keep track of project management.
Trello
Ideas can click whenever we want, but brainstorming can be a problem when you are not sitting in a conference room. Trello come in. They allow you to share ideas, manage to do’s and more, visually. It is almost like using a giant whiteboard to post sticky notes, tape ideas, and jot down and assign tasks. A typical board on Trello consists of lists which are arranged in the order of workflow. Individual cards make up the list which are ideally moved from left to right.
We can assign cards to ourselves or to each other as well as converse about issues involved in any of those tasks –
- To do list – Cards are placed here to assign new tasks
- Doing – The tasks that the person is currently working on.
- Done list – Completed tasks, archived at the end of each month.
Maruti Techlabs Marketing board Trello
If the project is bigger sometimes it takes the whole board!!!
When the project is too big!! (Ref: http://blog.trello.com/trello-board-best-practices/ )
Asana
We recently started using Asana for task management and team collaboration. We use Asana as a “teamwork tool without email”. It looks and acts like an email inbox but groups projects with the ability to add due dates, “likes” and stars for essential items in one place. It integrates with some other third-party sites including Gmail and Slack. Many well-known organizations like Uber and Mashable use Asana, so that’s a good sign that this tool is pretty popular.
Using Asana at Maruti Techlabs
There are a number of addition features users can take advantage of, including the ability to create custom themes and shortcuts.
Agile Product Management and Project Management Tools
Atlassian JIRA
JIRA by the Australian firm Atlassian is essentially a project tracking and management tool. JIRA allows you to track any kind of unit of work through a predefined workflow. Some common use cases for Maruti Techlabs include software development, feature implementation, bug tracking, agile project management (with JIRA Agile), and service desk ticket tracking (with JIRA Service Desk). We have customized both the issue and workflow depending upon the complexity and team’s specific requirements. JIRA’s flexibility and extensibility have really helped our team. JIRA has a very powerful and mature addon/plugin system, and there are many, many 3rd party vendors (and Atlassian themselves) making really cool and awesome add-ons. Also, the customization can be done from the GUI without any programming. For us, JIRA facilitates Agile methodology of software development and enables transparency of work with our client.
Atlassian JIRA for Project Management at Maruti Techlabs
GitHub
GitHub is a valuable resource for individuals and teams engaged in product development services. It is a source code management and version control tool.
Zephyr
As the number of projects increased, the quality assurance (QA) team at Maruti Techlabs found it difficult to manage multiple projects in parallel. Thus in addition to JIRA, QA team started using Zephyr. It is a test management platform suited for the teams which have mature testing processes and a lot of automation/manual testing. The tool allows QA team to work together on all aspects of testing with the context of the specific software release. It allows easy test case management.
TeamCity
TeamCity is a major all-in-one, extensible, continuous integration server. Written in Java, the platform is made available through the JetBrains. The platform is supported in other frameworks and languages by 100 ready to use plugins. TeamCity installation is really simple and has different installation packages for different operating systems.
Sonarqube
We use SonarQube as a continuous inspection tool. It is the central place to manage code quality. It offers visual reporting on and across projects and enabling to replay the past code to analyze metrics evolution. It is written in Java but is able to analyze code in about 20 different programming languages.
For a detailed account of DevOps tools you can visit 5 Essential Tools For DevOps Adoption
Conclusion
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At Maruti Techlabs, we understand the need to be up-to-date with the latest technology to help our clients with the most suitable and sustainable solutions. Our agile product development tools help us deliver the most innovative and impactful solution within the stipulated time and budget.
