The Project Manager's Guide to Mastering Agile: Principles and Practices for an Adaptive Approach

10 VersionOne Tool Overview

I'VE CHOSEN TO USE THE VersionOne tool as a representative example of an enterprise-level agile project management tool. This is not intended to be an endorsement of the VersionOne tool—I had to choose one tool to simplify this discussion and I chose VersionOne, just as some traditional project management textbooks have chosen to use Microsoft Project as a representative example of traditional project management tools. I chose VersionOne because it has a relatively complete set of the most important capabilities that I believe an agile project manager would need, it can be used with a variety of widely used development environments, and it is relatively easy to learn and use quickly.

However, the selection of a tool can be a difficult choice—for example, there is a significant trend to provide an overall Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool that integrates all aspects of a project including development and test with a project management tool. Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) is an example of a more complete ALM tool that provides a single, well-integrated environment for many aspects of software development, including source code control, testing, and project management.

The following sections provide a walk-through of how a tool like the VersionOne tool could be used to support all aspects of a large scale agile project, including product/project planning, release planning, sprint planning, and sprint tracking. The VersionOne tool also ...