Previous Article in this Series
Does “Process” sound synonymous with “Bureaucracy” to you? Take a fresh look…
Step 3: Use the right tools
Now you and your team have the right skills and you have the essential processes in place. How you wish this powerful combination could deliver you success in all projects automatically!
The fact is, it is not good enough.
Note the use of the word “essential” above. Keep in mind that there are many more “important” steps involved in managing software development projects, and they will become “essential” as you and your organization grow.
You must use the right software tools for various phases of the software development life cycle to compliment the good work you have done thus far.
This is the trickiest part. There are tools that are very powerful but very complex (not to mention, expensive) and there are tools that are fairly simple but will not do everything you wanted them to do. Finding the right tool for your needs is certainly a challenge.
While there are many tools available addressing the needs of the different phases, how we all wish there were this one magic wand of a tool that would make the entire process a child’s play. Well, keep wishing, for there is none today.
However, watch this space as Celeroo will fill a major gap in this arena in the next few months. You can subscribe to our newsletter to receive updates on launch dates, features, benefits etc., in addition to notifications on updates in this course.
In the meanwhile, adopt from the available tools and adapt them to your specific needs.
Let us briefly revisit the phases we mentioned in the previous article and highlight what to look for in the tool before we discuss each one separately in the next articles.
- Requirements Gathering and Analysis
- This requires a tool that lets you communicate with the business users, track the communications and share the documents. Celeroo helps the business analyst gather and organize requirements with a simple-to-use but powerful feature-set.
- This also requires a tool that can help create detailed functional specifications (text and/or visual) from the requirements, which can then be communicated unambiguously to the development and QA teams. Celeroo helps the business analyst create a detailed functional spec and an Allmostapp. Such a visual spec makes development a breeze and ensures all stakeholders are on the same page as regards the understanding of the requirements.
- Project Planning, Tracking and Reporting
- This requires a tool that allows you to create a plan with high level tasks broken down into detailed tasks. The tool should also be able to allow you to allocate resources and track the costs throughout the project. It must also be able to generate various reports for communicating with different stakeholders. Microsoft Project is probably the best tool out there. Since it is a complex tool, we have a separate tutorial on this that you would find useful.
- Design and Development
- This requires various tools and frameworks that developers use and depends on the technologies being used. However, certain tools are needed that are independent of technology and that help speed up development by ensuring that there is coherence between the business requirements, functional spec, the developed application and the communications throughout these phases. Celeroo helps ensure such a coherence through its easy-to-use features.
- Version control is an absolute must. Subversion (SVN) helps maintain branches of code efficiently.
- Testing (QA)
- This requires tools that help manage test cases. Microsoft Excel can be sufficient although custom applications are available.
- It is very helpful to have a tool that can help visualize your application with and without data filled in. Celeroo allows the application you build to be viewed with and without data that will help you identify certain issues that you will otherwise never find till customers face them in real life.
- Obviously, bugs are a way of life. A tool that helps you prioritize bugs and track the status as it goes through its life cycle is necessary. Bugzilla is a useful freeware for this.
- Release and Deployment
- Microsoft Excel can be used to create a checklist that shows the tasks etc. that are part of the release, so that a foolproof packaging of the application can be created and deployed.
We will now go into details of each phase with a focus on the right tools.
Next Article in this Series
The most important requirement for a successful project is to define requirements clearly…
No, we are not playing with words (Part 1)
Tags: 
Discussion
Comments for “You have the right people and the right processes to manage projects but… What next?”