Digital.ai Agility vs. Micro Focus Agile Manager (Discontinued)

Digital.ai Agility is an ideal tool for anyone who is looking to track the work of a software development team following agile processes. It easily supports multiple teams with multiple backlogs, but also allows aggregation and rollup across those teams for larger analysis and planning.

Incentivized

One scenario I believe HP Agile Manager is well suited is for a team of 5 or more developers who are releasing new features or addressing defects. Another scenario where it is beneficial is for teams of QA Automation engineers, where again, the objectives are clear. A scenario where I believe it would be less appropriate is for operations-type teams where objectives are not always clear cut, and the roles must be more reactive.

Incentivized

• Automated saving of changes, no records can be lost because all items are saved in real-time.
• The watch function, optional but beneficial when managing multiple teams or projects.

Incentivized

• Agile manager is particularly good for planning out sprints in an Agile methodology
• The Task Board in AGM gives clear swim-lanes to indicate progress/status, or to gauge that of another team member.
• The Dash Board gives visibility to team members capacity and the overall team burn down.

Incentivized

• Saving of changes is inconsistent. Sometimes the changes appear to save automatically and other times the user needs to click the "Apply" button. Until the user is familiar with when this needs to happen, work can easily be lost.
• This may be a setup configuration issue, but it would be good to be able to set the default team when creating stories. Too often stories are created and the user forgets to enter the team and they need to search the entire database for the story that was just created.

Incentivized

• Removing stories from a Sprint results in them being difficult to find later.
• Editing story details is slightly cumbersome.
• It's somewhat unclear how capacity fills up for stories split from prior sprints.

Incentivized

VersionOne provides outstanding training. They have Product Owner training that I recommend every Product Owner attend. They have scrum master training and other agile training that was well worth the money paid because it made the teams more productive. And the support for the tool is incredible. These people live and breathe Agile and are evangelists and enthusiasts.

Incentivized

We considered rally & AgileCraft since they also provides good support to SAFe framework. Though I personally found Rally better equipped but Rally was rejected due to its higher cost. AgileCraft & Version One provides many common features i.e Team Rooms, Planning Rooms, Capabilities Kanban, Road mapping but Version One support for collaboration tools & its seamless integration with GitHub played key role in going with Version One.

Incentivized

HP Agile Manager is beefy enough to work for bigger teams. In this way it matches closely to what is offered with Rally. One area it comes up short when compared to Rally is the apparent lack of a test management capability, where requirements can be entered then mapped to test cases. Agile Manager has some of the agile feel offered by Trello and Waffle but the added functionality that makes it more valuable for bigger teams.

Incentivized

• At first, it was difficult for the teams as we were learning Agile and VersionOne. But VersionOne provided us with great training and support. As such the teams were able to quickly adopt and embrace Agile.
• Our teams are now more efficient.
• Our time to market has decreased significantly.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to plan our Sprint work more effectively
• It has made it more clear how to accurately estimate certain problems
• It has given clarity over time as to the skill and work speed of team members

Incentivized