Agile project management software

What was before agile project management software
Until mid-1990's traditional software development has been carrying out with so called the "waterfall" methodology. This set of classic methods assumes a series of a project steps which proceed linearly to completion. Typically these steps include requirements, specifications, design, coding, testing, and delivery. According to the methodology, the project team immediately gets all requirements from the stakeholders at once. Then the team works on the development process during months or years. Upon completion the team produces a software product that meets the initial requirements. While this seems good in theory, in practice it often becomes less than successful. One of the primary reasons of failures is that the waterfall methodology doesn't cover changing requirements. This methodology takes the initial requirements as the basis but doesn't address the changing needs while the project evolves. There were no iterative development practices, and that's why the classic waterfall methodology has failed.

The basis for a new PM software solution has become iterative development practices that maintained constant user-developer interaction and self-organizing development teams taking software projects to the ever evolving nature of software requirements. Since these ideas have been picking up steam and getting greater popularity, today we know agile project management methodology which is driven by PM tools and practices.

Today's agile software and practices
Agile methodology focuses on strict requirements and designs iterative cycles of producing and releasing software to the end users. That methodology assumes that the end users are stakeholders who're actively involved in the prioritizing the requirements to be considered in every iteration. Design, coding and testing are all done in the iteration.

For example, agile project management scrum methodology uses short iterations to coordinate the team and develop what the end users really need. The agile SCRUM methodology allows the end user stakeholders to change, add, or remove requirements during every iteration to match their evolving needs. It helps ensure that the end users get the highest value for their investments. Additionally, since the SCRUM methodology minimizes upfront design costs, there's no wasted or lost work, whether a requirement is added or removed.

• Managing project tasks, resources and costs
• Tasks conflict resolutions and task filtering
• Comprehensive and flexible task views and task reports so in the tool you can quickly find the information you need
• Supporting task templates and checklists to get you started (as the agile project management software will let save time by creating templates for future projects)
• Setting task initial costs and finishing costs so the software will let keep track of planned and actual costs per task
• Supporting central resource allocation database so the tools will let deploy the database on a dedicated server

Read also a new article about process management - project management client-server software for Windows