DreamCatcher Agile Studio: Product Brochure

Transcription

1 DreamCatcher Agile Studio: Product Brochure

2 Why build a requirements-centric Agile Suite? As we look at the value chain of the SDLC process, as shown in the figure below, the most value is created in the upstream steps of the process, in the requirements and design phases. Once the requirements are defined and a design is agreed upon, revisiting these areas further downstream in the process can be costly as it results in re-work from the beginning. The requirements and design phases are also the most knowledge-intensive phases of the process with little room for automation. The requirements phase is particularly important from a market needs perspective, as this is your opportunity to build a product that fits the market needs. Investments in the requirements and design phases of the SDLC are therefore likely to have good overall benefits for the agile process and the quality of the product delivered. This is true regardless of the SDLC methodology followed (Agile or Waterfall). The requirements and design phases of the SDLC process often account for 40% or more of the total effort; they represent a significant portion of the overall effort. Given that these are upstream processes, often times these become bottlenecks in the process, leading to underutilization of the developers and testers that are waiting for these phases to be completed. The importance of these phases of the SDLC cannot be overstated. However, most organizations today are using general purpose word processing tools and spreadsheets to manage the requirements and design phases of the SDLC. These horizontal, general-purpose tools often lead to an unstructured representation of the data, typically in free-form text and images. Lack of structure leads to inefficiency as users have to enter a lot of free-form text to describe what could be done with far less text and fewer mouse clicks using structured data. Such unstructured data suffers from a number of limitations, as described in the figure below. These limitations are all too familiar and range from the lack of a single source of truth, to lack of concurrency, lack of consistency, lack of ability to track changes and the ability to search for text. Collaboration is typically achieved through which suffers from a number limitations as well (users lack the context and need to switch between applications to get the picture). The unstructured method of documenting requirements also leads to a lack of consistency as every Business Analyst has a unique way of describing requirements in free form text. Often 1 Copyright DreamCatcher Software. All rights reserved.

3 times this unstructured requirements definition misses the mark for developers or testers as crucial required data is missing or confusing, resulting in costly re-work. These general purpose tools offer limited capabilities in text-search. The lack of ability to search for text is further compounded by the fact that these unstructured documents could reside in multiple applications or locations. Finding items of interest is extremely difficult, timeconsuming or downright impossible. Switching between multiple applications for the various phases of the SDLC further hampers efficiency as different applications use their own lexicon and often times do not present the data in a consistent manner. Valuable time is lost interpreting and translating data between applications, as well as in exporting/importing data and massaging it. DreamCatcher Agile Studio was developed with the clear goal of solving these problems, as well as other related problems. 2 Copyright DreamCatcher Software. All rights reserved.

4 Introducing DreamCatcher DreamCatcher Agile Studio is a software package built on modern, multi-user architecture that is deployed in the cloud and delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) application. It is intended to be a truly Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Business Analysts, Project Managers, Developers and Architects that provides a 360 degree view to support requirements analysis, design, development, testing and project management. It can be used across the entire project portfolio. One of the key guiding principles of DreamCatcher is ease of use for the end user, and this has been carefully and thoughtfully built into the entire application with an intuitive and visually driven user interface. DreamCatcher Product Features DreamCatcher is a requirements-centric agile suite that addresses multiple aspects of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). While its primary focus is on Requirements Management, it also allows Project Managers or Scrum Masters to manage the agile process, Software Test Engineers to automatically generate test cases from the requirements and manage software defects, and all the team members of the project to participate in a collaborative manner. DreamCatcher allows the team members to focus on the core task of defining and building the software application, and not have to worry about documentation, which it takes care of automatically through the Document Generation feature. This allows the team to be more agile and focused on higher value added activities. 3 Copyright DreamCatcher Software. All rights reserved.

5 Requirements Management DreamCatcher is a comprehensive and structured Requirements Management system that allows customers to set up the business requirements for their software applications: a) Business Process Workflow: Ability to set up and visualize the end-to-end workflow of the application features from an end user perspective b) User Interface Details: Ability to set up and define user interface elements down to very fine-grained, widget-level details c) Business Rules: Ability to define business rules as they apply to the User Interface (such as validation or other business logic) as well as to Integrations d) Integrations: Ability to systematically define the business requirements for Application Integrations (i.e., defining how the application under development integrates with other external applications or systems through web services, message queues, file interfaces etc.) User Story Playback DreamCatcher introduces the ability to playback a user story using an audio-visual format that is a significant improvement over the traditional means of communicating the business requirements of the application under development. The playback feature has many benefits: a) Better medium for visualizing and communicating the application workflow and end user interaction b) Much more agile than traditional tools of documenting requirements ability to make changes quickly and socialize changes faster (this results in improved speed to market) c) Great tool for training and education of internal staff as well as external end users d) Great tool for demonstrating new software features to your customers and getting their feedback early in the cycle (improves speed to market) e) Better tool for developers and testing team to visualize the application workflow and develop test cases f) Very efficient for remote and distributed teams (especially offshore teams) g) Productivity enhancer spend less time documenting and more time innovating Agile Process Management DreamCatcher allows Project Managers and Scrum Masters to manage the agile process much more efficiently through automation and synergies with the requirements management module. Since requirements drive the work effort and tasks, DreamCatcher leverages the synergies between requirements management and the agile process, resulting in significant efficiencies for agile teams. a) Automated Estimation: DreamCatcher allows agile teams to leverage automated work effort estimation. Once the requirements have been defined, the work effort necessary to build the application as per the requirements is automatically estimated. DreamCatcher achieves this through the definition of estimate templates, skill level factors, learning curve effect factors as well as adaptive learning capability by continuously adjusting the estimates based on the actual effort spent by the team 4 Copyright DreamCatcher Software. All rights reserved.

6 members. The estimates generated by DreamCatcher can be further adjusted by team members, giving them more flexibility. b) Automated Task and Story Card Creation: DreamCatcher also has the ability to automatically create the detailed tasks necessary to complete the software application features. The tasks have detailed, fine-grained information and estimates necessary for the Software Developers to be able to work on the application features. c) Capacity Planning: DreamCatcher offers a very intuitive and visual interface to set up the capacity planning of the work items. It lets you re-assign the tasks to users allowing you to load balance the work effort within a sprint. d) Sprint Planning: DreamCatcher allows Project Managers and Scrum Masters to schedule the sprint planning of the work effort. This is driven directly from the requirements definition, allowing these users to not have to re-enter the data. e) Managing Story Cards: Users have the ability to edit the story cards assigned to them and enter their daily effort spent on the tasks. Once development is complete, they can update the status with a very intuitive single click to move the story card to the next lane of the scrum board. f) Managing Blockers: Users can raise blockers on their assigned story cards, if they are unable to work on it due to external factors. Users can either mark them as At Risk or Blocked depending on the level of the issue they are facing. DreamCatcher allows administrators or scrum masters to also configure custom Blocker Reasons that may be unique to them. DreamCatcher also presents the blocked story cards in a very intuitive and visual manner for ease of use. g) Review and Signoff Process: DreamCatcher also allows the Product Owners to review the work completed and mark it as approved or rejected. The system tracks who reviewed what and when. h) Burn-down Charts: DreamCatcher also generates the burn-down charts for the story cards that visualizes the intra-sprint progress of the team. DreamCatcher not only captures the hours burned, but also the percent completed of the total work effort a unique value add of DreamCatcher. i) View Story Cards by User: DreamCatcher allows users to view all the planned story cards for the current sprint by user allowing scrum masters to efficiently run their daily scrum meetings. This visual representation also shows the expected and actual percent complete by assigned user, as well as story cards blocked. Software Quality Management DreamCatcher also leverages the synergies between requirements and software quality through automated test case generation and defect management. This results in significant efficiencies for software test engineers through automation and results in much improved accuracy and consistency of test coverage. a) Automated Test Case Generation: DreamCatcher can generate test cases automatically from the requirements since it has a structured and very fine-grained view of the application requirements down to the individual widget-level attributes and business rules. The efficiency gains from this feature can be rather significant for test engineers. 5 Copyright DreamCatcher Software. All rights reserved.

7 b) Defect Management: DreamCatcher also allows users to create and manage software defects side-by-side with the requirements. This allows for improved visibility of requirements from the defects, and of the defects from the requirements. DreamCatcher also has a unique and innovative way of depicting open defects visually overlaid and color coded for severity on the requirements definition. This results in much improved ease of use and visibility. Global Text Search DreamCatcher offers a powerful text search capability that allows users to search for text across the entire breadth and depth of user defined content. This includes any textual elements and attributes defined on the various subject areas of the product such as the user interface widgets, business rules, defects, integration interfaces, discussion threads and more. This text search capability enables users to quickly locate items of interest. The search can be performed across all the projects, narrowed down to a project, further narrowed down to a folder or a user story, giving the users flexibility and control. Collaboration DreamCatcher offers a comprehensive collaboration platform that allows users to post questions and comments, as well as participate in the discussion related to these questions. Further, DreamCatcher also has the notion of the responsible user for the question, based on the topic of the discussion. This allows DreamCatcher to track the life-cycle of the discussion and notify the responsible users of any open questions that need their attention through notifications. Once the question has been resolved to the satisfaction of the original person who posted the question, the user can mark the question as resolved. Until the question has been resolved, it is considered open and DreamCatcher sends daily notifications reminding the responsible user to respond to the open questions. The figure below graphically captures the feature-set of DreamCatcher. While the requirements management capability is the central core, a number of surrounding features offer significant value add for the agile teams. DreamCatcher Business Benefits DreamCatcher is a requirements centric Integrated Agile Suite that allows you to run your Agile software development projects more efficiently and with lower delivery risk. The business benefits of using DreamCatcher can be categorized into the following four categories: Improve Speed-to-Market (Agility) Brainstorm and visualize new product ideas quickly and more effectively Make changes to existing products much quicker Get end-user feedback on new product ideas much earlier in the development cycle Focus on working software rather than documentation Allow business users to define requirements instead of relying on IT Improve Efficiencies (Reduce Costs) Reduce cycle-times through better tools for requirements analysis and documentation Reduce bottlenecks in the SDLC process through a more efficient upstream process 6 Copyright DreamCatcher Software. All rights reserved.

8 Improve product quality through better documentation of requirements and design Automate test case generation Automate work effort estimation Automate story card (task) creation Automate design document and requirements document generation Gain scale economies from Integration Patterns Reduce time spent working in and switching between multiple applications Reduce Delivery Risk Improve team communication and visibility through better collaboration and 360 degree view across the SDLC Reduce errors through automation of test case generation Create more transparency in the estimation process Reduce defects through better documentation, improved accuracy and consistency Use playback feature for visualization of the workflow improving how requirements are communicated and understood Reduce time taken to fic defects through more accurate and better traceability Better alignment between UI and Integrations (from requirements and sprint planning perspectives) Alleviate technology skills gap through best of breed tools Improve Employee Engagement, Satisfaction and Retention Allow employees to focus more on value-add tasks and less on manual, tedious tasks Create a more engaging and fun environment through the audio-visual playback feature Allow employees to connect and be more productive through a more intuitive user experience Improve team communication through better collaboration tools Improve job satisfaction for employees by enabling them to create higher quality products aligned with the market needs and customer expectations Realize Cost Reductions of 20-30% DreamCatcher benefits almost all the team members of an agile team. The table below summarizes the efficiency drivers and gains for an agile team, by team-member role. A typical agile team could realize 20-30% in efficiency gains from using DreamCatcher (actual results may vary depending on a number of factors). DreamCatcher Agile Studio provides an excellent return on your investment, when you factor in the additional benefits from improved speed to market, lower delivery risk and improved employee engagement and retention. 7 Copyright DreamCatcher Software. All rights reserved.

9 More importantly, DreamCatcher allows agile teams to significantly lower delivery risk through improved communication, accuracy, consistency and visibility. The reduction in delivery risk is perhaps more important than the efficiency gains for some organizations, as software application development is an art that is difficult to master and on-time delivery with high quality often remains an elusive goal. About DreamCatcher Software DreamCatcher Software LLC was founded with the singular mission of improving the efficiency, productivity and engagement of the IT workforce. Our cloud-based software product, the DreamCatcher Agile Studio is built to accelerate your Agile Software development projects. We are committed to making a positive impact on the working lives of our end-users, and we continually strive to make our product more feature rich, intuitive and user friendly. Request a Product Demo Today! We would love the opportunity to demonstrate the product features and articulate the business benefits of the product. Please request a product demo by filling out this online form. We are looking forward to working with you! 8 Copyright DreamCatcher Software. All rights reserved.