1. SpiraPlan® - Product Information
Accelerating Project Delivery with Agile Project Management

2. After viewing this presentation you will:
Objectives
After viewing this presentation you will:
Understand the challenges involved in planning and managing projects and why traditional waterfall methodologies have failed to deliver projects on-time and on-budget.
Have a strong grasp on the project management features provided by SpiraPlan®
Have learned about the benefits of using SpiraPlan® to plan, execute and manage your project

3. Agenda Why use Agile Methodologies Project Management Challenges
SpiraPlan® Overview
Feature Walkthrough
Requirements Management
Release Planning
Iteration Planning
Task Tracking
Bug / Issue Tracking
Source Code Integration
Integration / Migration Options
Synchronization with external bug-trackers
Migration from other systems

4. Why Agile Methodologies?
Traditionally projects are delivered in a series of phases that are based on increasing levels of certainty around the system being built:
However this approach has some drawbacks:
It is not flexible to changes in customer requirements
Time is wasted building features that nobody needs
The end user cannot give feedback till it’s completed coded
You don’t know how stable the system is until the end
Traditional Waterfall Methodology
Requirements
Gathering
Business Design
Technical Design
Systems Development
Unit
Testing
Integration
Testing
Acceptance
Testing (UAT)
Release Complete

5. Traditional Waterfall Methodology
The Agile Approach
Instead of phases, projects are broken down into releases and iterations. At the end of each iteration you have a fully functioning system that could be released:
Traditional Waterfall Methodology
Requirements
Gathering
Business Design
Technical Design
Systems Development
Unit
Testing
Integration
Testing
Acceptance
Testing (UAT)
Release Complete
Agile Methodology
Limited Upfront Planning
Release #1
Release #2
Release #3
Release #4
It 1
It 2
It 3
It 4
It 5
It 6
It 7
It 8
It 9
It 10
It 11
It 12
Release Complete
Iteration N
Iteration Planning
Development, Continuous Integration, Unit Testing, Functional & Acceptance Testing

6. The Agile Approach (3)
The requirements for the project do not have to be codified upfront, instead they are prioritized and scheduled for each iteration:
The requirements are composed of ‘stories’ that can be scheduled into a particular release and iteration
Release Plan
Iteration
Tested,
Integrated
Working
System
Iteration
Scope
Iteration
Plan

7. The Agile Approach (3) There are several different agile methods:
Scrum
Extreme Programming (XP)
Agile Unified Process (AUP)
Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
They have specific features that make them better suited to different situations, but in general, they follow the same basic agile principles*:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
*Source: Agile Manifesto -

8. The Existing Project Management Toolkit
Traditionally, Software Development organizations use the following tools to manage their lifecycles:
Requirements stored in MS-Word documents, MS-Excel spreadsheets or expensive tools such a RequisitePro, Doors
High-level project plan (GANTT chart) developed in tools such as Microsoft Project, Primavera and printed out for reference
Project estimates prepared using a combination of the high-level project plan and specialized standalone MS-Excel spreadsheets
Detailed schedules maintained by individual team members using MS-Excel, Whiteboards or Groupware solutions
MS-Access, MS-Excel or standalone web-based bug-tracking system for tracking issues and defects

9. Project Management Toolkit Challenges
As the static project plan with its discrete phases has become replaced by the more flexible agile approach, the old set of tools no longer works:
The project requirements and scope are not locked-down so the schedule of releases and iterations needs to be connected to the requirements backlog in real-time
The project schedule is constantly evolving, with stories being reallocated to different iterations and team members re-estimating the number of stories they can complete (velocity)
Defects and stories need to be managed in the same environment, with the project estimates and schedules taking account of both at all times
SpiraPlan is explicitly designed to address these issues and provide an integrated solution…

10. SpiraPlan® Overview

11. Product Overview
Instead of having to buy separate requirements management, project planning and defect tracking tools, SpiraPlan provides a complete Agile Project Management solution in one package.
SpiraPlan manages your project's requirements, user stories, release plans, iteration plans, tasks, bugs and issues in one environment. Since it’s web based, teams can collaborate in real time and have up to the minute visibility of the project’s status.

12. Why Choose SpiraPlan?
The top reasons that our customers choose SpiraPlan over other solutions are:
It is a complete solution that includes requirements management, release planning, iteration planning, task estimation and defect tracking all fully integrated from day one.
Highly intuitive web application that provides a complete picture of a project’s status and health yet requires only a web-browser.
Methodology Agnostic – SpiraPlan can be used equally web for any agile methodology – including Scrum, AUP, XP, DSDM
Ability to leverage your existing technology investments. SpiraPlan integrates with many third-party defect-management systems and software configuration management (SCM) systems.
In addition, we provide superb technical support that ensures that enquiries and questions are dealt with in a timely and professional manner.

13. Feature Snapshot
Listed below are some of the many great features that makes SpiraPlan agile project management software the leading choice for companies and organizations worldwide:
Develop high-level requirements with initial estimates
Prioritize and schedule requirements for each iteration
Determine resourcing levels to deliver required features
Planning board for easy communication of backlog
Decompose requirements into detailed task breakdown
Integrated web-based document management.
Allocate tasks to developers based on task estimates
Load-balance project resources to maximize project velocity
Track issues and defects against project schedule
View project velocity, burndown and burnup reports
Customizable dashboards of key project information
Integration with multiple IDEs

14. Competitive Landscape
We believe that SpiraPlan offers an unbeatable combination of capability and affordability:
Source: Inflectra Corporation, 2011
Niche Players
Challengers
SpiraPlan
XPlanner
Mingle
JIRA & Greenhopper
ScrumWorks
AcuNote
AxoSoft OnTime
Affordability
SmartBear QaComplete
Uncompetitive
Incumbents
Breadth of Features / Capability

15. Representative Customers
The following are some of the organizations who are using SpiraPlan to manage their application development lifecycles:
Energy & Industrial
Financial & Business Services
Government
Information Technology
Healthcare & Bio-Technology
Telecommunications
Retail & Consumer Goods
Transportation & Hospitality

16. Testimonials
“…My team has used SpiraPlan for over 6 months and have been satisfied with the Project Management and collaboration features of the software. Will definitely use Inflectra products again.“ - Dan – Vector One Consulting
“…SpiraPlan from Inflectra is a lifesaver! It was very easy to use, organized, and user-friendly. I will definitely recommend and utilize this program in the future.” - Lindsay Snider
“…We use Inflectra software in many of our projects and we are proud to offer their tools to our customers. It is also big pleasure to cooperate with the Inflectra team.“ - Viktor Tarnavskyi – Soflab Technology
“The team here really have a great product on their hands with helpfulness and ease. Who wouldn't use this software for business planning needs?! ...“ - Mika

17. Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan (1)
The first step is to define the project’s requirements.
This is a hierarchical list of all the features that the system needs to fulfill (in some methodologies they are called user stories)
They can be entered by hand, imported from a variety of tools:
MS-Office documents such as Excel, Word or Project
Modeling tools such as RequisitePro or Enterprise Architect
They can be prioritized, contain attachments, be cross-linked and have project-specific attributes
Don’t worry about getting it all right first time, this is Agile, so the requirements will evolve during the project!
Define Requirements

18. Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan(2)
Next, plan out the project’s high-level schedule
Include the major releases, minor releases and optionally builds and iterations depending on desired granularity
You can now assign the different lower-level requirements to each of the iterations so that it is possible to start planning the features that will be developed in each release and iteration based on customer priority and business value.
In some methodologies (e.g. Scrum) the requirements list is called the Project Backlog and iterations are called Sprints.
Define Requirements
Release Planning

19. Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan(3)
Now you start the iteration planning (for the first one):
Decompose the requirements into detailed project tasks that can be prioritized and individually estimated. These estimates can be then compared against the top-down requirement estimate
Assign any defects that were raised in the previous release/iteration into the current iteration for resolution
Potentially re-assign the requirements and tasks to different iterations, if there is not enough time/resources to support the planned functionality
In some methodologies (Scrum) this is called ‘sprint planning’
Define Requirements
Release Planning
Iteration Planning

20. Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan(4)
Now you can schedule the team members and load balance the task resourcing allocation:
Assign the discrete project tasks and defects to the members of the development team staffed to the iteration
Team members view their individual schedule and task assignments to determine if they can perform all the tasks
The detailed task schedule is updated by the team members, with the release/iteration schedule reflecting the updates so that the management can make changes to the master schedule
Define Requirements
Release Planning
Iteration Planning
Schedule & Resourcing

21. Introduction to Agile using SpiraPlan (5)
Real-time status of the progress of the iteration and release is visible by the management during execution:
The team members update the actual effort, remaining effort and predicted end-date values of their various tasks as they complete the assigned workload
When tasks are completed, or if exception conditions occur (late starting tasks, late finishing tasks, overruns, etc.), the status of the overall iteration and release is updated to give early indication of needed management intervention
In addition the progress of the tasks is linked back to the original requirements, so there is full requirements traceability
Define Requirements
Release Planning
Iteration Planning
Schedule & Resourcing
Tracking & Reporting

22. Feature Walkthrough

23. Personalized ‘My Page’
Upon login to SpiraPlan, you are presented with a personalized ‘dashboard’ of all your key information, consolidated onto a single page for you to take immediate action.
RSS Feeds of your information are available

24. Project Home Page
Each project has a dashboard home-page that summarizes all of the information regarding the project into a comprehensive, easily digestible form.
It provides a “one-stop-shop” for people interested in understanding the overall status and health of the project at a glance. It includes key graphs such as task burndown and team velocity

25. Project Portfolio Management
Projects in SpiraPlan can be organized into Project Groups that belong to a common organization, customer or division. This allows you to view a summary project group dashboard that lets you view the aggregate status of the group as whole as well as compare the relative health of the different projects in the group.

26. Requirements Management
You have the ability to create and manage project requirements, user stories and use cases in a hierarchical organization. Requirements can be prioritized, estimated and also associated with a specific release. Each requirement is displayed with its associated development task progress.

27. Requirements Elaboration (Tasks)
Each requirement can then be decomposed into its low-level assignable work items called ‘tasks’. Each can be separately estimated to validate the overall high-level requirement story-point estimate.

28. Release Planning
You have the ability to create a master release schedule containing all the major milestone releases together with the individual iterations – smaller releases of the system delivered every 4-6 weeks.

29. Iteration Planning
The requirements (user stories), tasks and outstanding incidents (bugs, issues) can be scheduled against the different iterations in the release.
The system will calculate the available effort as requirements are added.

30. Agile / Scrum Planning Board
The Planning Board allows teams to easily visualize the requirements, tasks and incidents assigned to each iteration.
You can drill-down to see the items assigned to each developer in iteration for load-balancing.
Drag-and-drop editing and color-coding maximize efficiency.

31. Task Progress Tracking
SpiraPlan provides the ability to edit assign and track the project tasks. You can search, filter and sort the list of tasks to quickly find those that are behind schedule or are late starting.
This allows you to track the progress of the tasks in the system and determine if tasks are suffering from schedule overrun or estimate inflation. In addition you can compare actuals for continuous process improvement.

32. Resource Tracking
Once the requirements, tasks and incidents have been scheduled against the iteration plan, you can use the Resource Tracking screens to view the total assigned workload for the members of the project and determine the resource assignments and perform load balancing if necessary.

33. Bug / Issue Tracking
The system provides the ability to create, edit, assign, track, manage and close incidents (i.e. bugs, issues, risks, defects, enhancements) that are raised during the testing of the software system under development.

34. Document Management
All documents and web links uploaded to the system are available in the integrated document management system. This allows you to organize the documents into folders, categorize by document types and associate with meta-tags. Once uploaded, users can search, sort and filter the documents as well as find dynamically related items through the meta-tag hyperlinks.

35. Document Version Tracking
Once uploaded to the central knowledge repository, revisions to the documents can be uploaded so that there is complete audit trail of all changes made to artifacts and associated documentation in the project.

36. Instant Messaging & Collaboration
SpiraPlan includes an integrated instant-messenger that lets users collaborate and communicate in real-time regardless of geographic location. The discussions can be codified and tagged against specific artifacts in the system, so that they become part of the artifact discussion thread.

37. Customizable Incident Fields
You can customize each of the fields used in the Incident tracking module to suit your own business needs - including incident type, status, priority and severity. You can even associate your own color schemes with the different priorities and severities.

38. Customizable Workflows & Notifications
Different types of incident, requirement and task can follow their own customized workflow. This allows you to tailor SpiraPlan to the business processes used by your organization. Each workflow consists of a customizable set of steps and transitions.
In addition each transition can be used to send notifications to the detector, owner or users in a certain project group.

39. Attachments & Screenshot Capture
You can upload document attachments to Requirements, Tasks, Releases and Incidents in the system. Each of these artifacts includes an attachment view that allows users to view the existing attachments, delete an existing attachment and upload new documents from their workstation.
In addition, there is a built-in screen capture utility for quickly adding screenshots to a test execution or incident report

40. Software Configuration Management (SCM)
SpiraPlan allows you to link your existing software configuration management (SCM) repositories to a particular project. When this is done, you can browse the contents of the repository (folders, files and revisions) directly in the SpiraPlan web interface.

41. Source Code Integration
In addition to being able to view the contents of the source code repository, using SpiraPlan you can link artifacts in the system to specific source code revisions. This allows you to associate implemented requirements, completed tasks or resolved defects/incidents with the corresponding code changes. This provides end-to-end traceability from requirements to software code.

42. Build Management
SpiraPlan provides the ability to integrate with continuous integration build servers such as Hudson and CruiseControl so that the status of builds can be recorded in SpiraPlan and linked to source code revisions and incidents. This provides traceability for each build, so that you can see what was changed in each build and what was fixed.

43. Customizable Reporting Dashboard
SpiraPlan includes an extensive reports library that can display information such as Requirements Progress, Release Plan Status, Task Progress and Incident Status.
SpiraPlan allows you to build a customized reporting dashboard featuring your frequently-used graphs, charts and reports.
The graphs available include: Project Velocity, Burndown, Burnup, Bug Discovery Rates, and Incident Aging.
Supported formats include HTML, XML, Word, Excel.

44. Timecard Submission
SpiraPlan includes a built-in timecard entry system that lets developers quickly and easily enter the time spent each day on their assigned tasks and incidents.

45. Change History Tracking
All of the changes made to a particular artifact in the system are tracked by SpiraPlan, so that at any time you can view the complete audit trail of all the changes made to an artifact, including the date of the change, who made the change, and what information was changed.
SpiraPlan features full version-control capabilities that allow you to rollback specific changes and revert the artifact back to a prior revision.

46. Artifact Associations
Each requirement can be linked to an unlimited number of other requirements, incidents and source code revisions, providing traceability between related artifacts. For example a change request incident that turns into a new requirement can be associated to preserve the pedigree of the requirement.

47. Custom Properties
In addition to the built-in fields that are associated with each type of artifact, you can also define custom properties for each type of artifact in the system.
The system supports a variety of different field types including: text, rich-text, dropdown lists, user selectors, and date-fields

48. Visual Studio & Eclipse IDE Integration
Developers can work on assigned requirements, tasks and incidents directly inside their Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
SpiraPlan has plug-ins available for both Eclipse and Visual Studio.
Research has shown that allowing developers to use the same tool to develop their code and manage their workload enhances efficiency and improves data accuracy.

49. Integration
SpiraPlan has a built-in notification engine that lets you define custom templates and notification events. This enables the system to send out notifications when specific events occur (e.g. user is assigned a test case, the priority of a requirement changes, etc.).
In addition, SpiraPlan can connect to your system and retrieve users’ comments and attach them to the appropriate artifact in the system. It can also create new incidents directly from s, saving users’ time.

50. Integration / Migration Options

51. Integration Overview
SpiraPlan has a very flexible architecture and has been integrated with a variety of external tools and systems:
SpiraPlan
Requirements
Releases
Tasks
Defects
Documents
Various Tools
Requirements
Bugzilla
Defect-Tracking
Visual Studio
Defect-Tracking
Jira
Defect-Tracking
FogBugz
Defect-Tracking
MS-Office
Legacy Data
Configuration Management
Development Environment
Subversion
Source Code
Git / Mercurial
Source Code
Selenium-RC
Functional Testing
Eclipse
Task Mgt
Visual Studio
Task Mgt
TestComplete
Functional & Load Testing

52. Integration with Build Servers
SpiraPlan® is able to connect to your continuous integration (CI) build server to link revisions and defects with continuous builds:
Currently Available:
Hudson
Jenkins
Planned:
CruiseControl
TeamCity
Atlassian Bamboo

53. Integration with Bug-Tracking Systems
SpiraPlan® is able to leverage your existing investments in requirements management and bug tracking systems:
Bug / Issue Tracking
Synchronize incidents with Atlassian JIRA
Synchronize incidents with Bugzilla
Synchronize incidents with FogBugz
Synchronize incidents with Mantis
Synchronize incidents with Microsoft Team Foundation Server
Synchronize incidents with AxoSoft OnTime
Synchronize incidents with IBM Rational ClearQuest and RTC

54. Integration with Requirements Mgt Systems
SpiraPlan® is able to leverage your existing investments in requirements management and UML modeling systems:
Synchronize requirements with IBM Rational RequisitePro
Synchronize requirements with Sparx Enterprise Architect
Synchronize requirements with Jama Contour
Synchronize requirements with IBM DOORS
Synchronize user stories with Version One

55. Integration with SCM Systems
SpiraPlan® is able to leverage your existing investments in Software Configuration Management (SCM) systems:
Current:
Integration with Subversion repositories
Integration with CVS repositories
Integration with Microsoft TFS repositories
Integration with Microsoft VSS repositories
Integration with Mercurial distributed repositories
Integration with GIT distributed repositories
Integration with Perforce repositories
Planned
Integration with Rational ClearCase repositories
Integration with StarTeam repositories

56. Integration with Developer IDEs
SpiraPlan® is able to integrate with your developers’ Integrated Development Environment (IDE):
Ability to manage requirements, tasks and incidents inside Microsoft Visual Studio
Ability to manage requirements, tasks and incidents inside the Eclipse IDE

57. Please contact sales@inflectra.com if you have additional questions.

58. Legal Notices
DISCLAIMER: All product comparison diagrams have been made on the basis of information available on respective product websites. The analysis and views expressed in the diagrams and the information made available are purely those of Inflectra Corporation.  It is possible that competing products have additional features not mentioned on the product websites.