When everyone hears about Mavenlink, everyone gets so excited to use this incredible agile software in their company. Many have already learned that Mavenlink can surprisingly help them save time, effort and money whenever they need a collaborative software. Aside from knowing that Mavenlink is considered as the world’s first ever project-delivery cloud with a SaaS project-delivery system, which will let you improve all your business outcomes and efficiently scale and manage your projects, people and profits, you also need to get familiar with the history of Mavenlink.

With just a simple hint of idea, Mavenlink have started. Due to difficulty in operating service businesses, the absence of right technology and changing people’s way of working together, the birth of Mavenlink became possible. With today’s need for a reliable agile software, Mavenlink greatly provides various companies an advantage in managing their project-based relationships lifecycle such as resource management, team and project management, time and expenses, online payments and invoicing, financial reporting and collaborative messaging and conversations. So, if you have decided to choose Mavenlink to provide you a dependable agile software, what else you can expect from them and what are the pros and cons you will encounter?

Pros:

• Time tracking integration. By using Mavenlink’ agile software, you need a third party pool. You may now organize or manage your entire projects timely as well as and plan and assign tasks efficiently as compared to your previous project operations. Because of its smart cross-platform with collaborative features, it will be easier for you to post, share and receive the updates of your projects immediately and be on the same page as all your other team members.
• Advanced searching. Another valuable advantage of this profound agile software is that it will surprisingly let you have an advanced searching. After you have imported the data in it, you may now store it in a centralized and accessible database. Here, you will able to quickly locate all you needed files or messages without digging into all your emails.
• Flexible Price. Businesses from different scales or industries can have the best agile software as Mavenlink have no recurrent costs in a way that all the collaborative functions are already bundled in an initial package price.
• User-friendly. With Mavenlink having user-friendly features, it will be easier for you to introduce its agile software to your staff. Here, all your necessary information are kept in a single place, making the sharing of information much easier. Another thing, it has an excellent customer and support service where you can expect that they will listen to your feedbacks for the improvement of its functionality.

Cons:

• The timer will not allow you to switch between the tasks quickly and easily.
• You cannot easily export a Gantt or project plan in a nicer view.
• It needs more filter options.
• Too much features wherein some are useless.

Who uses Mavenlink and what about its pricing?

The great thing is, small businesses, mid-sized businesses and large enterprises can take advantage of the Mavenlink collaborative software. Business can choose from different plans. In fact, they can start using it for as low as. $19 per month. They can also use the free trials or choose from the premium and subscription pricing model. On the other hand, iMeet Central, Wrike, Asana, PlushForums, Autodesk PLM 360 are some of the popular competitors of Mavenlink.

— Slimane Zouggari

Clarizen is a collaborative software that has been created in order to provide agile teams of companies with easy to use tools that would help them prioritize their tasks, manage issues that arises and achieve their desired results. With the fact that it is available in the cloud, reduced cost and increased efficiency can be expected. This is the reason why there has been an increase in the number of Clarizen users in the world.

What does it do?

Clarizen is an agile software that aims to help project managers complete all of the tasks that they have on time and while ensuring that they will not exceed their allotted budget for it. Through it, a company can start with a certain project that they have in mind even though they haven’t completed the plan for it. With its help, a project or task would be able to have its own flexible baseline that is also capable of responding to anomalies real time. Thus, one would surely be able to save a lot of time while utilizing it and they would also be able to boost their productivity at the same time.

Advantages

• Effortless Collaboration. Everything that is related to a project or a task can be stored in this collaborative software and this only means that everyone who is involved in the project or task would be able to have an access to it with ease. It would also be right to say that it offers visibility to all of the organizational levels. Hence, the employees would be able to work more efficiently in order to provide the results that are expected from them.
• Ease of navigation. One great thing about Clarizen is that it has a neat and clean interface, In fact, it is even possible for you to see all the modules I just a single navigation bar. Not only that, you can also add note and select between the different views and project templates that it has. With its ease of navigation, for sure, you would not have a hard time using it.

Disadvantages

• Requires a lot of time. If this is your first time using an agile software or a software that has something to do with scrum, then it might take you a while to master how to use it, especially if you consider yourself a non-tech savvy.
• It is still lacking. There are still some room for improvement when it comes to it being used for collaborative purposes. In fact, there may be some features such as reporting tools that this software doesn’t have that others have. Nevertheless, the creators of the software sees to it that updates are available.

Pricing

There are different Clarizen plans available for purchase. The enterprise edition is available for $60 while the unlimited edition is offered for $80. On the other hand, there are also 4 Clarizen License Types including the full, team member, time & expense and social license. There is also a 30 free trial for the agile software. For more accurate pricing, you can also use the cost calculator that is available from their website.

— Slimane Zouggari

Asana serves as a mobile and web application that is designed to support any teams to effectively track all their projects and works. In 2008, it was founded by Dusting Moskovitz (Facebook co-founder) and Justin Rosenstein (former engineer). They worked on enhancing the level of performance of various employees at the social networking site.

Officially, the agile software was launched in November 2011. With the magnificent services of the company, its people announced that they had acquired $1.2 million from various investors in the same year. Because of its incredible performance, it has even worked on a number of high-profile clients such as Pinterest, Airbnb, Uber, Samsung and many more. Once you make it as your top option, you will definitely have a peace of mind because it has a reliable reputation.

Benefits of Using Asana

• Determine your customers’ issues – By using the agile software, you will be able to experience many benefits such as tracking customer service issues and marketing. Although you have not easily identified your client’s needs and problems, Asana has the ideal solutions that can help address the dilemmas. With that, you can enhance your customer service that can increase your advantage to gain more potential and prospective customers at a more reasonable cost.

• Easy to use – Aside from identifying your customer service predicaments, you will never encounter a burden when you use it. You and your entire team can immediately learn on how to employ it properly. It can really make your business more collaborative that can fully amaze you. It also has several messaging apps in which you can have your best option. Thus, sending messages to other team members will be as easy as pie.

• Enhance General Management – In Asana, you will easily manage multiple tasks and project. When you assign any task to your whole team via email, you have to make yourself prepared enough to handle potential issues. When you do not address them at once, you can experience incoherent record of past communications and difficult task progress tracking. With the use of Asana, you can avoid those dilemmas efficiently. So, general management is enhanced.

Disadvantages of Using Asana

Even though the agile software can make numerous advantages highly possible, it has disadvantages that you should know. It has various apps that have comparable feature sets. When you are looking for a tool that has different apps, the application is not the perfect choice for you. Nevertheless, you are very fortunate because there are outstanding devices that you can take advantage of. With an ample amount of time and patience, you will choose one of the best providers in the industry.

To sum it up, the web or mobile application is a great help when you want to make a lot of incredible changes in your business. Whether you want to successfully manage your whole team or make them collaborative, it is the one of the best ways to make your objectives achievable. Be one of their complacent clients and see how it can give you the same experience.

— Slimane Zouggari

For more than 15 years in this industry, Youtrack undoubtedly provided JetBrains’ clients with the most effective and strongest developer tools including agile software where you can discover, grow and create better results for your projects. They are best known as a commercial-based bug tracker, project management software and issue tracker perfectly developed by JetBrains. Its main focus is to search a query-based issue by manipulating issues by batch, auto-completion, creating a custom workflow and customizing a set of issue attributes. Moreover, for the past 15 years of experience of JetBrains, they have already received various awards, making Youtrack one of the trusted agile software for your issue tracker requirements. So, what other things you can expect from YouTrack?

• Smart search function. Youtrack will enable you to find the information you need quickly through its auto completion. It can provide you short cuts in order to significantly help you in accelerating the mundane process and efficiently improve your output. Another thing, it can allow you to closely monitor each of your projects as well as the team’s action through the personal live dashboard.
• Time efficient tracking capabilities. With the use of the YouTrack agile software, you will be able to get significant insights and you can also track your progress in each of your projects by the means of a powerful issue tracker tool which allows you to make better decisions for your business or even implement your business strategies effectively. Youtrack will help in managing and allocating time through its efficient time tracking capabilities.
• Flexible workflow. This issue tracker tool will allow you to process your own customizable workflow where you can get an IDE together with a DSL for you to define the workflows with code in a precise and flexible manner. Also, it will allow you to describe the path where the issues have to go, automate the next steps or even set a schedule for automated actions or notifications. So here, most issues in the field are customizable and the issue tracker can even speak your language of choice.

Pros

• Works very fast
• Flexible agile boards
• Flexible search bar
• Provides comfortable navigation for task overview
• Allows the creation of adjustable program custom login and custom field for successful custom workflows
• Supports a wide range of processes for the customization of fields
• Strong agile support for burndown charts, backlog and board with a huge capacity of reports
• Provides easy search for issues and it gets you all the unresolved issues that were assigned to you.
• Quite useful dynamic models

Cons

• Not automated time reports and timetracking – the time reports as well as general reports are not quite flexible and there is no pause/play timer.
• Unimplemented project overview – you cannot obtain any data for a certain project except the name.

Who uses YouTrack?

Through Youtrack, team leaders and managers will be able to provide a feedback and an input to their members by just tagging, adding attributes, highlighting codes and attaching screenshots. Also, it enables the testers and developers to sort, filter and save their previous queries.

The monthly or yearly subscription for the YouTrack is $20 per month or $200 per year for every 15 users. On the other hand, BugClipper, SpatialKey, Codeship, AB Tasty, Central, ADAudit Plus, Leankit, SISA Assitant are the popular competitors of Youtrack which also offers an issue tracker.

 — Slimane Zouggari

In 2006, Wrike was found by Andrew Filev. The agile software has released the Wrike product beta version in December 2006. Initially, it was integrated with emails that enabled users to track schedules, tasks and deadlines. The company has also released a professional and full version of the software in June 2007. It has provided a unique email integration and predefined workflow groups.

With the spectacular reviews from their clients, many innovations have continued. Wrike added customization options and new workflow tools to its system in 2014. Because of a number of great changes, they have secured $15 million in May 2015. They were given the chance to have investors including DCM Ventures, Bain Capital and Scale Venture Partners. At present, the company has 200 employees and 8,000 customers.

The agile software is useful for:

1. Marketing Teams – In every task that your collaborative team works on, all of you can get real-time visibility. You can create reports that will track the performance and project. There are workload reports that shows a bandwith for your next project. There are also interactive timelines that keep your entire team on a similar page.
2. Creative Teams – The Company knows that all creative teams spend more time in projects, deadlines and tasks that greatly affect the activity they are passionate to do. When you have the same situation, reclaim your creative and imaginative time by using Wrike.
3. Project Management Teams – When you belong to a collaborative project management team, Wrike could be a big help on your part. It is an agile software that can help you set priorities and make your whole team work wiser and smarter. With Wrike, you can have a faster business that can become more collaborative at all times.

Benefits

• Collaboration is available in individual tasks – As a business owner, you have to try your best to attain business efficiency and employee productivity. By using Wrike, you can achieve collaboration in your entire company easily.
• Scalable and affordable price structure – Wrike offers many features but the thing that makes it great is its affordability. There is a professional package that costs $49 every month. Through that, you can operate a business with unlimited collaborators and success as well.

Cons

• No customization feature – The agile software does not have a feature that will allow you to change its layout and appeal. However, you can change its color that can result to a branding success.
• Unavailable PC client – Wrike does not provide a PC client because it is just a web-based solution. Synchronizing and working with your needed data offline will not be easy. So, you have to work online at all times. When you want more flexibility, you can use some of its competitors like SaaS solutions.

Indeed, Wrike is one of the useful applications you can ever have when you belong to marketing, creative and project management teams. Take advantage of the software now before you make a decision that you will regret. Aside from collaboration, you can achieve business efficiency and awesome success.

 — Slimane Zouggari

Fog Creek Software started to develop Trello in the midst of summer 2010 and in September 2011, it was finally launched at the TechCrunch Disrupt, providing various apps for iPhone and for the web. By May 2015, Trello officially goes international and has provided a localized experience for Spain, Brazil and Germany. Today, Trello is considered to be one of the leading agile software for project management applications. Another thing, it ranked no. 1 in the project management apps category which garnered a score of 9.8 held by Wrike and also amazingly won the Best Project Management Software Award for 2015.

Trello as a collaborative software, it allows you to discuss projects in a real time manner and it can keep you well-informed about it through task assignments, email notification and activity log. Plus, you can easily add new members in a board where you are free to vote for ideas that are contained in the cards. Aside from the mentioned functions of Trello as a reliable agile software, here some of its interesting features which will help you have a successful project management.

• Immediate collaboration. Here, you can be provided with the latest development of your projects and the changes can appear immediately onscreen. Therefore, this agile software is quite collaborative on your chosen features.
• Versatile use. This agile software has a card system which contains all the possible sources of information regarding the project where its drag and drop interface will allow you to edit in-line. Also, the website is accessible from any browser.
• Instant notification. Trello will allow you to have an instant notification alert whenever there is a new task assigned or if there are changes or updates made to the project.
• Well-organized things. Through its collaborative features, it will help you organize things where the cards can be placed in the lists in order to track the progress of your projects.
• Customized list Here, you will be able to have a customized list of assigned tasks as well.
• Stay connected. With the use of Trello, you can keep everyone connected even if there are lots of people and boards. Also, it allows you to create as many teams as you want through your free account.
• Private and secure data. With this agile software, you have a full and complete control of your boards where the data are sent over a secure HTTPS/SSL connection.

Pros

• Visual interface – a pleasurable experience and interaction
• Flexible system – you can freely create your own workflow or change them

Cons

• Sometimes, the list might appear too long
• The deadlines of cards may not be what you expected
• It is not quite easy to use for first time users

Trello will provide you a free use of their basic service. In a Trello Gold, you will pay $5 per month while in a Trello Business Class, you will pay an amount of $5 per month per user. The popular competitors of this agile software are Basecamp, Wrike, JIRA, Genius Project, 10000ft, Podio and Asana.

 — Slimane Zouggari

Taskworld

Taskworld is a collaboration platform (Cloud-based) created by Fred Mouawad. The Software as a Service (SaaS) is specially designed to manage project management, collaboration, knowledge management, delegation, communication and a lot more. Assigning and receiving tasks, adding followers, recording comments, organizing projects, sharing and storing unlimited files will also be a breeze.

In 2006, there was an initial version of the custom-built software. It was made as a solution to address internal issues about accountability, time management and delegation. It was also constructed to avoid failures. Later, the Synergia One implemented the Task Management System that was a success. Because of that, Mouawad has created My Taskworld which later changed into Taskworld. Officially, it was founded in February 2012. In the same year, the founder of the agile software presented a Taskworld prototype at the Business Department of Stanford Graduate School.

Advantages

The agile software provides a lot of features and benefits that can make anyone feel satisfied. These are project management, enterprise messaging and big data & analytics. If you want to experience a huge change in your business, they are the company you can count on throughout your journey.

• Task Management – They created an app that can help manage all your tasks effectively. You can create and organize all your present and future projects easily. There are also tasklists feature that will allow you to create a comfortable and efficient workflow. If you are in doubt, you will realize their utmost importance once you try it.

Aside from that, you can assign tasks and make a reliable/time-bound due dates. With that, there will be clarity in objectives that can result to a collaborative teamwork. When you experience having a hard time informing your entire workforce, the company’s app could be a better support on your part.

• Enterprise Messaging – You can prevent email clutter and other issues by sending them the right messages or files. As a result, you can make your entire team agile that can ensure a grand success. You can also create a variety of public channels that will reach all members of a certain organization. You can employ the app provider’s project chat that can lead to a collaborative teamwork as well.

Cons – At present, most of their clients love cloud-based applications a lot. Whether you have a startup business or seasoned company, you can totally rely on it. Thus, it is tailored to cater all your specific needs and objectives.

Pricing – By choosing Taskworld, you can experience an excellent quality app at a more reasonable and fairer cost. Within 15 days, you will love their free trial. After that, you will pay $8 per month that can result to more savings. In addition, credit card is not required. You can achieve a huge difference without a high expenditure.

Needless to say, task management, enterprise messaging and analytics will be a breeze by using the agile software. Whatever your company is, Taskworld is one of the best applications for you aside from Asana, Wrike, Huddle, Trello and Basecamp Classic. Use it as soon as possible and be ready to encounter a successful business.

 — Slimane Zouggari

Scrumwise

Founded in 2009, Scrumwise is known as the company behind the creation of the most advanced, intuitive and friendly scrum tool across the marketplace and is based in Denmark. They have already established their company’s reputable name from the date they have existed through their motivation and passion in creating an agile software that will surely let every user experience its finest details.

What can you expect from it?

• Comprehensive functionality. Even if you did not have much training about using agile software, with Scrumwise, you can perform basic and comprehensive operations. Here, you can easily create a task or sub-task where you can create your sprint planning. Its burn down feature is quite clear and can collaborate with your choice, whether you wanted to use a story point with hours or a few percentage in order to locate the progress of your work items. Also, it has a simple interface which will allow you to update your board or move a task around.
• Valuable support. Through years of expertise, their scrum solution has massively improved because of their dedicated team in providing their clients important details about their queries, Another interesting thing about them is that they are quite open for improvements. They will collaborate with you and provide you an API which you can effectively use in creating or manipulating your scrum data.
• Real time security. One of the most important features that Scrumwise can provide is security. Here, data is not located in America for it is hosted at Amazon’s European data centers located in Ireland. Also, their enterprise-class is creatively designed to be used for critical missions and is organized in a firewalled production environment to ensure reliability and real time security.

Who uses an agile software?

Basically, anyone who has a complex project can use an agile software from Scruwise, especially when they wanted to create to-do lists that can be turned to manageable tasks in order to have a well-improved communication and teamwork as well as faster and better results. Also, the scrum tool is widely used by various companies. Some of the users of Scrumwise are:

• Small businesses
• Medium business
• Large businesses

Pros

• Complete list of task management. Scrumwise can provide you a complete list of task management features starting from setting the task priorities to the grouping of tasks by projects.
• Efficient track burn rates. Scrumwise will amazingly help you minimize your expenses in tracking your burn rates on your projects that are in progress as it efficiently introduces you great plans and budgeting.

Cons

• Unable to create gantt. Although it is a great thing that Scrumwise can provide you any other feature for traditional project management, unfortunately, it cannot create gantt charts.

How about the pricing?

With a monthly subscription, you will only pay a starting price of $9 that you can pay through your credit card.

Scrumwise Alternatives

There are some popular alternatives for Scrumwise namely Mavenlink, Wrike, Clarizen, Zoho Projects, WorkZone Project Management, Vorex Management Suite, ProWorkflow and Oracle Primavera.

— Slimane Zouggari

Jira

Believe it or not, there are a lot of agile software that you can purchase and utilize. However, not all of them does a great job in helping your team in planning, tracking and releasing the software you have always been dreaming to offer to your target users like the Jira software. With its use, it is very much possible for you to upgrade your workflow as well.

As an agile software, it offers great functionality such as issue tracking, support, resource management, budgeting, task management, customization collaboration and others. It is suitable for both small and large companies. It can even be used for personal use as well. Not only that, through this software, you can now also connect with your tea anywhere you are for it is now available for mobile use.

Advantages

When it comes to seamless engagement and information dissemination, there is no doubt that this agile software is a great software to use. It makes it possible for a member to monitor the overall progress of the tem and use joint editing tools at the same time. Collecting customer requests can also be done through its use with ease. Not only that, one can also arrange these requests based on priority that would be of great help in improving the team’s productivity. It also does a great job in creating, tracking and organizing defects. In the non-agile build, there are also gadgets and filters that are already built-in. through these gadgets and filter, you can now create a dashboard daily.

Disadvantages

One of the drawbacks of using this agile software is that it is rather quite hard to setup. It has always been considered as a complicated software for it started off as a bug tracker and has evolved a lot throughout the years. So, if you are not happy with the software’s default configuration, then you would have a hard time configuring it and customizing it according to your needs. It would also be quite difficult to integrate it to other similar tool suites. It also does not provide a history drop and so, it would not be that easy to find the bug or hidden story.

Pricing

Just like what was mentioned before, this agile software is suitable for small and big teams. For teams with up to 10 members or users, it would cost them $10 every month. On the other hand, for teams with 15 members or users, they need to spend $75 every month in order for them to use it. To cut things short, it could cost as low as $100 and as high as $15,000 annually, depending on how many members would be using it.

Jira also has a lot of competitors including Trello, Asana, Redmine, VersionOne, Bugzilla and others. Each one of these agile software offer unique features that would surely be beneficial for testers and developers. Nevertheless, despite the tough competition going on, the Jira still remains as one of the most used software in the industry.

— Slimane Zouggari

When you say CI (continuous integration) in software engineering, this refers to the practice of merging the entire working copies that can be shared mainline in several times per day. The main aim of continuous integration is to prevent the integration problems from arising. Therefore, it is important to identify between two because there is disagreement about virtues.

History

In 1994, Grady Booch used CI (continuous integration) in Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Application (2nd edition), wherein it explained how and when the evolving using of micro processes, such as existing of force closure in micro process and the internal that releases and represent sort of continuous integration of system.

In 1997, Ron Jeffries and Kent Beck invented the XP (Extreme Programming) in the Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System project including the continuous integration. Kent Beck published the continuous integration in the year 1998 wherein it emphasizes the importance of personal communication over the technological support. During 1999, Kent Beck expounded his first full boo in Extreme Programing and it is released in 2001.

What is it?

CI (Continuous Integration) is the development practice that needs a developer in order to assimilate the code into shared repository for several times. Every check-in will be verified by automated build wherein it allows the team to identify problem immediately. By assimilating regularly, it can help you to detect errors as well as locate it easily.

Since you are integrating frequently, there is important backtracking that you can discover when there are something going wrong. With that, you are able to spend a lot of time in building its features. Aside from that, CI is cheap unlike with non-continuously integrating. If you did not follow the continuous approach, you can have the longer periods between the integration. With that, it makes the exponentially more problematic and has a consistent problem. With the integration problems, it can be cause of a project-off schedule and fail it altogether.

CI brings numerous benefits to your company such as:

1. Say Goodbye for a tense and long integrations
2. It can increase the visibility wherein it enables a greater communication
3. Identify the issues immediately and more time in adding features
4. It can reduce an integration problems that allows to deliver software rapidly

How

Continuous integration has it several important practices such as:

1. Developers check the code
2. Once it is done, the changes will apply on repository
3. CI server will monitor its repository and check the changes
4. Then, server will build its system, run unit and have an integration tests.
5. Once the test successful, they will inform the team
6. Once there is problem, the team will immediately fix the issue immediately
7. It will continue to integrate and test all over the test

Risks and Pitfalls

CI serves as safety net in order to have a faster change in a code. However, this method has it risks such as:

1. Once the single test fails, the entire build process will be failed.
2. The programmers have their affiliation with code
3. What does the test that cannot see can escaped

Just like with other thing, CI has its also pitfalls that you need to prevent in order to avoid from possible problems and difficulties.

— Slimane Zouggari