Item: Agile Hive
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Agile Hive - SAFe in Jira

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Agile Hive is used for our value train within a SAFe setup. Every quarter we organize a so-called Product Increment (PI) Planning, where we plan all Features and Enablers in Agile Hive. Based on the priority of the Product Manager all teams plan their Features and Enablers accordingly to the sprints that are determined by the Release Train Engineer and set up in Agile Hive. The teams then create User Stories and estimate them and based on their sprint velocity (defined in Agile Hive) Product Owners can see how many Features and Enablers are realistic in one quarter (Product Increment). Further, dependencies across teams can be defined and made visible in Agile Hive, so that the plan is feasible. Without Agile Hive it would be hard or impossible to plan across several teams within a value train and to manage all dependencies. Additionally, with Agile Hive the plan is more realistic, so what can be achieved within one quarter in product development.

Pros and Cons

Pros

manage & visualize dependencies across teams
visualize capacity within a time frame
show priorities and plan accordingly

Cons

it is not possible to plan if teams have different sprint length
zoom into one sprint and then also zoom out to have big picture
names of user stories are not good to read because of static big picture

Return on Investment

More efficient planning of product increment (less time wasted)

Usability

It has in general a good usability, but there are some downsides, the big picture view of the entire product increment is too static, so there is no zoom in or zoom out. Mostly throughout planning it is necessary to zoom in to a sprint level and manage the user stories there. Also, the pig picture view has some limitations, because you cannot read the entire user story name (boxes are too small).

Alternatives Considered

Jira Software and Miro

With Jira Software alone it is also possible to plan a SAFe product increment planning, but it would be nearly impossible to see the overall big picture of all product teams involved in a release train. So, the planning on sprint level for one team would be more efficient, but the planning for a whole quarter with all dependencies across teams would be not feasible to present. Therefore, Agile SAFe enables value trains an efficient way to plan a product increment.

Key Insights

Do you think Agile Hive delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Agile Hive's feature set?

Yes

Did Agile Hive live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Agile Hive go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Agile Hive again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Miro, Jira Software, Atlassian Confluence

Likelihood to Recommend

Agile Hive is used for our value train
within a SAFe setup. Every quarter we organize a so-called Product Increment
(PI) Planning, where we plan all Features and Enablers in Agile Hive.
Based on the priority of the Product Manager all teams plan their Features and
Enablers accordingly to the sprints that are determined by the Release Train
Engineer and set up in Agile Hive. The teams then create User Stories and
estimate them and based on their sprint velocity (defined in Agile Hive)
Product Owners can see how many Features and Enablers are realistic in one
quarter (Product Increment). Further, dependencies across teams can be defined
and made visible in Agile Hive, so that the plan is feasible. Without Agile
Hive it would be hard or impossible to plan across several teams within a value
train and to manage all dependencies. Additionally, with Agile Hive the plan is
more realistic, so what can be achieved within one quarter in product
development.

Agile Hive Feature Ratings

Comments

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Agile Hive makes your PI planning less chaotic