Following our post on the importance of transparency in the agile development process, we received a number of questions about the “how”. While we can’t speak for everybody, we can give insight into our process. Here are a list of the tools we use to ensure that our agile app development process remains as transparent as possible.

JIRA

JIRA is a project management tool that we use to manage project velocity, organize user stories, and track bugs. In our process, we allow clients full access to all JIRA boards associated with their projects. Every user story, every bug logged, and the overall status of the project is always accessible.

JIRA allows us not only to manage the project, but also remain transparent as team members and stakeholders can see exactly where their project stands, down to specific issues and features.

Slack

Slack is a powerful productivity tool that – while not exclusive to mobile app development – lends itself well to it. For each project, we create designated channels in Slack and include all project managers, stakeholders, developers, and project team members. Every message or update made is seen by everybody who has joined the channel.

We’ve found that it is more effective than other tools like Skype because we can communicate with clients quickly and access all messages throughout the duration of the project using Slack’s search functionality.

JIRA also integrates with Slack, so every update or change made on boards are pushed to a the Slack channel associated with that particular project. This allows everyone involved – from stakeholders to project managers and developers – to stay up-to-date on each stage of the process on a granular level.

If you don’t use JIRA, Slack has an impressive list of integrations, which includes project management tools like Asana and Trello.

Confluence

Confluence is a team collaboration tool that allows you to create, organize, and discuss work with your team. Like JIRA, it is an Atlassian product, and it offers JIRA integration so you can create issues and link to your existing issues, epics, and sprints.

For our app development projects, we use Confluence as a wiki between teams. We upload, manage, and share any documentation related to a project that is not a user story. Confluence allows us not only stay better organized, but also to easily share documents and specs internally and with clients and their teams, and vice versa.

Using these tools in our agile app development process allows us to remain as transparent as possible. And transparency is not the only advantage. These tools help eliminate inefficiencies, improve communication both internally and with our clients, and keep the project on track.

To learn more about the role of transparency in agile app development, visit our previous post.