Spira Plan Overview Presentation

© Copyright 2006-2016, Inflectra Corporation - 1 -

SpiraPlan® - Product InformationAccelerating Project Delivery with Agile Project Management


Objectives After viewing this presentation you will:

Understand the challenges involved in planning and managing projects and why traditional waterfall methodologies have failed to deliver projects on-time and on-budget.

Have a strong grasp on the project management features provided by SpiraPlan®

Have learned about the benefits of using SpiraPlan® to plan, execute and manage your project


Agenda Why use Agile Methodologies Project Management Challenges SpiraPlan® Overview Feature Walkthrough

Requirements Management Release Planning Iteration Planning Task Tracking Bug / Issue Tracking Source Code Integration

Integration / Migration Options Synchronization with external bug-trackers Migration from other systems


Why Agile Methodologies? Traditionally projects are delivered in a series of phases

that are based on increasing levels of certainty around the system being built:

However this approach has some drawbacks: It is not flexible to changes in customer requirements Time is wasted building features that nobody needs The end user cannot give feedback till it’s completed coded You don’t know how stable the system is until the end

RequirementsGathering

Business Design

UnitTesting

Traditional Waterfall Methodology

Release Complete

Technical Design Systems Development Integration

Testing

AcceptanceTesting (UAT)


The Agile Approach Instead of phases, projects are broken down into

releases and iterations. At the end of each iteration you have a fully functioning system that could be released:

RequirementsGathering

Business Design

UnitTesting

Traditional Waterfall Methodology

Release Complete

Technical Design Systems Development Integration

Testing

AcceptanceTesting (UAT)

Limited Upfront

Planning

Release #1 Release #2

Agile Methodology

It 1 It 2 It 3 It 4 It 5 It 6

Release #3

It 7 It 8 It 9

Release #4

It 10 It 11 It 12

Iteration N

Iteration Planning

Release Complete

Development, Continuous Integration, Unit Testing, Functional & Acceptance Testing


The Agile Approach (3) The requirements for the project do not have to be codified upfront,

instead they are prioritized and scheduled for each iteration: The requirements are composed of ‘stories’ that can be

scheduled into a particular release and iteration

Iteration

IterationScope

Tested,IntegratedWorkingSystem

IterationPlan

Release Plan


The Agile Approach (3) There are several different agile methods:

Scrum / Extreme Programming (XP) Kanban / Lean Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

They have specific features that make them better suited to different situations, but in general, they follow the same basic agile principles*: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan

*Source: Agile Manifesto - http://agilemanifesto.org


The Existing Project Management Toolkit Traditionally, Software Development organizations use

the following tools to manage their lifecycles: Requirements stored in MS-Word documents, MS-Excel

spreadsheets or expensive tools such a RequisitePro, Doors

High-level project plan (GANTT chart) developed in tools such as Microsoft Project, Primavera and printed out for reference

Project estimates prepared using a combination of the high-level project plan and specialized standalone MS-Excel spreadsheets

Detailed schedules maintained by individual team members using MS-Excel, Whiteboards or Groupware solutions

MS-Access, MS-Excel or standalone web-based bug-tracking system for tracking issues and defects


Project Management Toolkit Challenges As the static project plan with its discrete phases has

become replaced by the more flexible agile approach, the old set of tools no longer works: The project requirements and scope are not locked-down so the

schedule of releases and iterations needs to be connected to the requirements backlog in real-time

The project schedule is constantly evolving, with stories being reallocated to different iterations and team members re-estimating the number of stories they can complete (velocity)

Defects and stories need to be managed in the same environment, with the project estimates and schedules taking account of both at all times

SpiraPlan is explicitly designed to address these issues and provide an integrated solution…


SpiraPlan® Overview

© Copyright 2006-2016, Inflectra Corporation

SpiraTeam®

The Inflectra® Product Suite

SpiraTest®Requirements, Test & Defect Management

SpiraPlan®Agile Project Management

KronoDesk®

IT Support & Help Desk Ticketing

Rapise® Test Automation Platform (Web, GUI, Services)

TaraVault™ - Source Code Hosting

We provide a complete suite to manage your entire lifecycle:


SpiraTeam®

SpiraPlan – The Agile Delivery Solution

SpiraTest®Requirements, Test & Defect Management

SpiraPlan®Agile Project Management

KronoDesk®

IT Support & Help Desk Ticketing

Rapise® Test Automation Platform (Web, GUI, Services)

TaraVault™ - Source Code Hosting

SpiraPlan provides the complete agile toolkit, with integrated code hosting:


Product Overview Instead of having to buy separate requirements management,

project planning and defect tracking tools, SpiraPlan provides a complete Agile Project Management solution in one package.

Agile Development & Project Management

Web-based User Interface

Project and User Management Core Functionality

Robust APIs

User Stories Iterations & Sprints Tasks & Defects


Why Choose SpiraPlan? The top reasons that our customers choose SpiraPlan

over other solutions are: It is a complete solution that includes requirements management,

release planning, iteration planning, task estimation and defect tracking all fully integrated from day one.

Highly intuitive web application that provides a complete picture of a project’s status and health yet requires only a web-browser.

Methodology Agnostic – SpiraPlan can be used equally web for any agile methodology – including Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, DAD, AUP

Ability to leverage your existing technology investments. SpiraPlan integrates with many third-party defect-management systems and software configuration management (SCM) systems.

In addition, we provide superb technical support that ensures that enquiries and questions are dealt with in a timely and professional manner.


Feature Snapshot

Develop high-level requirements with initial estimates

Prioritize and schedule requirements for each iteration

Determine resourcing levels to deliver required features

Planning board for easy communication of backlog

Decompose requirements into detailed task breakdown

Integrated web-based document management.

Allocate tasks to developers based on task estimates

Load-balance project resources to maximize project velocity

Track issues and defects against project schedule

View project velocity, burndown and burnup reports

Customizable dashboards of key project information

Integration with multiple IDEs

Listed below are some of the many great features that makes SpiraPlan agile project management software the leading choice for companies and organizations worldwide:


Competitive Landscape We believe that SpiraPlan offers an unbeatable combination of

capability and affordability:

Breadth of Features / Capability

Affo

rdab

ility

VersionOne

AxoSoft

JIRA Agile

ScrumWorks

MingleXPlanner SpiraPlan

IncumbentsUncompetitive

ChallengersNiche PlayersSource: Inflectra Corporation, 2016

AcuNote

CA Rally

IBM RTC

LeanKit

TargetProcess


Representative Customers The following are some of the organizations who are using

SpiraPlan to manage their application development lifecycles:

Energy & Industrial

Government

Retail & Consumer Goods

Healthcare & Bio-Technology

Financial & Business Services

Information Technology

Transportation & Hospitality

Telecommunications


Testimonials “…My team has used SpiraPlan for over 6 months and have been satisfied with

the Project Management and collaboration features of the software. Will definitely use Inflectra products again.“- Dan – Vector One Consulting

“…SpiraPlan from Inflectra is a lifesaver! It was very easy to use, organized, and user-friendly. I will definitely recommend and utilize this program in the future.”- Lindsay Snider

“…We use Inflectra software in many of our projects and we are proud to offer their tools to our customers. It is also big pleasure to cooperate with the Inflectra team.“- Viktor Tarnavskyi – Soflab Technology

“The team here really have a great product on their hands with helpfulness and ease. Who wouldn't use this software for business planning needs?! ...“- Mika


Solution Partner Network We have an extensive worldwide partner network that is used to

provide global consulting and training services:

North America

Asia

Australia

South America & Mexico

Europe

Middle East & Africa


How Are We Different?1. We help you manage the entire project lifecycle—not just

planning, development, or testing—all of it!2. Our products are actually understandable, easy to use and

affordable3. We provide exceptional support with every purchase—our

support is so good, customers call us to help fix products with their other tools (!)

This is validated by our ~ 80% customer retention rate.


Feature Walkthrough


Personalized ‘My Page’ Dashboard

SpiraPlan provides you with a personalized ‘dashboard’ of all your key information, consolidated onto a single page for you to take immediate action. RSS Feeds of your information are available


Project Dashboards

Inside SpiraPlan, each project has a dashboard home-page that summarizes all of the information regarding the project into a comprehensive, easily digestible form. It provides a “one-stop-shop” for people interested in understanding the overall status and health of the project at a glance.


Project Portfolio Management

Projects in SpiraPlan are organized into Project Groups. This lets you report on all of the projects in a specific organization, customer or division. You can see the aggregate status of the group as whole and in addition, compare the relative health of the different projects in the group.


Requirements Management

SpiraPlan lets you to quickly and easily organize requirements to reflect dependencies and relationships. Requirements can be prioritized, estimated and also associated with a specific release. Each requirement is displayed with its associated development task progress.


Capture User Stories & Use Cases

SpiraPlan supports the capture and management of user stories and use-cases as part of the requirements definition process. Use cases can be stored in the system along with their associated scenarios.


Requirements Elaboration (Tasks)

SpiraPlan lets you decompose each requirement into lower-level Task work items. These can be assigned to team members and individually estimated.SpiraPlan lets you compare the top-down story point estimate with the detailed task estimates.


Release Planning

SpiraPlan® provides the ability to manage the list of releases / versions of the software being delivered. SpiraPlan supports iterations/sprints for agile projects as well as phases for waterfall and/or hybrid projects giving you maximum flexibility.


Product Backlog Planning

The list of user stories, requirements, defects and features is called the Product Backlog. SpiraPlan lets you organize the backlog by component, package or priority. You can order and categorize them by simple drag and drop editing. This is called backlog grooming.


Sprint / Iteration Planning

The requirements, user stories, tasks and outstanding bugs and issues can be scheduled against the different iterations / sprints in the release.The system will calculate the available effort as items are added.


Scrum Task Boards

SpiraPlan includes Scrum Task Boards that let you see the individual tasks assigned to each of the Sprints and Iterations as well as by-person.


Kanban Boards

SpiraPlan provides a Kanban view of the project, where you can see all of the requirements planned for each release organized according to their position in the lifecycle. This view lets you see the flow of the requirements and identify then rectify any bottlenecks.


Task Progress Tracking

SpiraPlan provides the ability to edit assign and track the project tasks. You can search, filter and sort the list of tasks to quickly find those that are behind schedule or are late starting. Task can be grouped into folders to make it easy to organize by track, stream or functional area.


Resource Tracking

Once the requirements, tasks and incidents have been scheduled against the iteration plan, you can use the Resource Tracking screens to view the total assigned workload for the members of the project and determine the resource assignments and perform load balancing if necessary.


Bug / Issue Tracking

SpiraPlan offers a complete bug tracking solution that is fully integrated with your planning system. Bug tracking features include support for customizable workflows and fields, flexible reporting, configurable email notifications, and fully editable statuses, priorities, severities and bug types.


Document Management

SpiraPlan includes an integrated web-based document management system that allows project members to upload documents in a secure, centralized location, with support for folder organization, documentation taxonomies and meta-tagging as well as built-in version control.Unlike a standalone tool, these documents can then be connected to SpiraPlan artifacts (requirements, tasks, incidents) to provide the complete picture to users.


Document Version Tracking

Once uploaded to the central knowledge repository, revisions to the documents can be uploaded so that there is complete audit trail of all changes made to artifacts and associated documentation in the project.


Instant Messaging & Collaboration

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SpiraPlan includes an integrated instant-messenger that lets users collaborate and communicate in real-time regardless of geographic location. The discussions can be tagged against specific artifacts in the system, so that they become part of the artifact discussion thread.


Fully Mobile Responsive

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SpiraPlan has been designed to optimize its features on any device, whether that be a large desktop monitor, a tablet or mobile phone.The Agile Planning Boards built into SpiraPlan allow you to see the complete project on large screen devices, with the ability to easily drag and drop items.


Customizable Fields

You can customize each of the fields used in the bug tracking module to suit your own business needs - including types, status, priority and severity. You can even associate your own color schemes with the different values.


Customizable Workflows & Notifications

Different types of defect, requirement and task can follow their own customized workflows. This allows you to tailor SpiraPlan to the business processes used by your organization. Each workflow consists of a customizable set of steps and transitions. In addition each transition can be used to send email notifications to the detector, owner or users in a certain project group.


Attachments & Screenshot Capture

You can upload document attachments to Requirements, Tasks, Releases and Incidents in the system. Each of these artifacts includes an attachment view that allows users to view the existing attachments, delete an existing attachment and upload new documents from their workstation.

In addition, there is a built-in screen capture utility for quickly adding screenshots to a test execution or defect report


Software Configuration Management (SCM)

For those customers using the cloud hosted version of SpiraPlan, we offer a free source code hosting solution – TaraVault based on the industry standard Git and Subversion platforms. For on-premise customers you can link you existing source code repositories using our gallery of plugins.


Source Code Integration

In addition to being able to view the source code repository, using SpiraPlan you can link artifacts to specific source code revisions. This allows you to associate requirements, tasks or defects/incidents with the corresponding code changes. This provides end-to-end traceability from requirements to working software code.


Build Management

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SpiraPlan provides the ability to integrate with continuous integration build servers such as Jenkins and TeamCity so that the status of builds can be recorded in SpiraPlan and linked to source code revisions and incidents. This provides traceability for each build, so that you can see what was changed in each build and what was fixed.


Customizable Reporting Dashboard

SpiraPlan includes an extensive reports library that contains our of the box reports for typical project management needs. In addition, SpiraPlan allows you to build a customized reports using built-in custom report writer.


Timecard Submission

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SpiraPlan includes a built-in timecard entry system that lets developers quickly and easily enter the time spent each day on their assigned tasks and defects as well as report the time remaining for completion.


Change History Tracking

All of the changes made to a particular artifact in the system are tracked by SpiraPlan, so that at any time you can view the complete audit trail of all the changes made to an artifact.SpiraPlan features full version-control capabilities that allow you to rollback specific changes and revert the artifact back to a prior revision.


Artifact Associations

Each artifact can be linked to an unlimited number of other requirements, defects, tasks and source code revisions, providing traceability between related artifacts. For example a change request that turns into a new requirement can be associated to preserve the pedigree of the requirement.


Custom Properties

In addition to the built-in fields that are associated with each type of artifact, you can also define custom properties for each type of artifact in the system.The system supports a variety of different field types including: text, rich-text, dropdown lists, user selectors, and date-fields


Visual Studio & Eclipse IDE Integration

Developers can work on assigned requirements, tasks and incidents directly inside their Integrated Development Environment (IDE).SpiraPlan has plug-ins available for both Eclipse and Visual Studio.Research has shown that allowing developers to use the same tool to develop their code and manage their workload enhances efficiency and improves data accuracy.


Email Integration

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SpiraPlan has a built-in email notification engine that lets you define custom email templates and notification events. This enables the system to send out notifications when specific events occur (e.g. user is assigned a test case, the priority of a requirement changes, etc.).

In addition, SpiraPlan can connect to your email system and retrieve users’ comments and attach them to the appropriate artifact in the system. It can also create new incidents directly from emails, saving users’ time.


Integration / Migration Options


Configuration Management

Integration Overview SpiraPlan has a very flexible architecture and has been integrated

with a variety of external tools and systems:

SpiraPlanUser Stories

SprintsTasks

DefectsDocuments

BugzillaDefect-Tracking

JiraDefect-Tracking

Visual StudioDefect-Tracking

Various ToolsRequirements

MS-OfficeLegacy Data

SCM ToolsSource Code

TaraVaultSource Code

Selenium-RCFunctional

Testing

FogBugzDefect-Tracking

TestCompleteFunctional &Load Testing

Development Environment

EclipseTask Mgt

Jenkins/HudsonCI / Builds


Integration Options SpiraPlan comes with a wide variety of plugins and connectors:

Developer IDEs

Legacy ALM Tools

Modelling Tools

CI / Build Servers

Bug-Tracking Tools

Legacy Data Import

Source Code Management

Help Desk Tools


Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan

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Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan (1) The first step is to define the project’s requirements.

This is a hierarchical list of all the features that the system needs to fulfill (in some methodologies they are called user stories)

They can be entered by hand, imported from a variety of tools: MS-Office documents such as Excel, Word or Project Modeling tools such as RequisitePro or Enterprise Architect

They can be prioritized, contain attachments, be cross-linked and have project-specific attributes

Don’t worry about getting it all right first time, this is Agile, so the requirements will evolve during the project!

Define Requirements


Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan(2) Next, plan out the project’s high-level schedule

Include the major releases, minor releases and optionally builds and iterations depending on desired granularity

You can now assign the different lower-level requirements to each of the iterations so that it is possible to start planning the features that will be developed in each release and iteration based on customer priority and business value.

In some methodologies (e.g. Scrum) the requirements list is called the Project Backlog and iterations are called Sprints.

Define Requirements Release Planning


Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan(3) Now you start the iteration planning (for the first one):

Decompose the requirements into detailed project tasks that can be prioritized and individually estimated. These estimates can be then compared against the top-down requirement estimate

Assign any defects that were raised in the previous release/iteration into the current iteration for resolution

Potentially re-assign the requirements and tasks to different iterations, if there is not enough time/resources to support the planned functionality

In some methodologies (Scrum) this is called ‘sprint planning’

Define Requirements Release PlanningIteration Planning


Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan(4) Now you can schedule the team members and load

balance the task resourcing allocation: Assign the discrete project tasks and defects to the members of

the development team staffed to the iteration Team members view their individual schedule and task

assignments to determine if they can perform all the tasks The detailed task schedule is updated by the team members,

with the release/iteration schedule reflecting the updates so that the management can make changes to the master schedule

Define Requirements Release PlanningIteration Planning Schedule &

Resourcing


Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan (5) Real-time status of the progress of the iteration and

release is visible by the management during execution: The team members update the actual effort, remaining effort and

predicted end-date values of their various tasks as they complete the assigned workload

When tasks are completed, or if exception conditions occur (late starting tasks, late finishing tasks, overruns, etc.), the status of the overall iteration and release is updated to give early indication of needed management intervention

In addition the progress of the tasks is linked back to the original requirements, so there is full requirements traceability

Define Requirements Release PlanningIteration Planning Schedule &

ResourcingTracking & Reporting


Questions?Please contact [email protected] if you have additional questions.


Legal Notices DISCLAIMER: All product comparison diagrams have been made

on the basis of information available on respective product websites. The analysis and views expressed in the diagrams and the information made available are purely those of Inflectra Corporation. It is possible that competing products have additional features not mentioned on the product websites.

Date post:	17-Jan-2017
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