Posts Tagged 'Project Management'
Maximizing Project Performance with Spira: A Guide to Lead and Cycle Time Metrics
February 27, 2024
Are you looking to unlock the full potential of your project management with Spira?
Learn how to accurately measure, analyze, and optimize your software development processes with Inflectra's handy guide on mastering Lead and Cycle Time metrics to achieve enhanced efficiency and productivity. Dive into the details of these crucial metrics, ensuring data integrity, and visualizing process efficiency to drive your projects to success.
Read MoreSpira vs. JIRA+Plugins: Witness a Game-Changing Shift in Project Management Excellence
February 20, 2024
In a recent webinar that shook the foundations of project management, attendees were treated to an eye-opening demonstration of SpiraPlan's superiority over the conventional JIRA+Plugins approach. The webinar, titled "Witness a game-changing shift in project management excellence," provided a comprehensive overview of how SpiraPlan outperforms JIRA+Plugins in terms of intelligence, integration, and cost-effectiveness. Continue reading to access the webinar recording, highlights, slideshow, and more.
Read MoreUsing SpiraPlan for Configuration & Change Management
September 29, 2022
We recently demonstrated SpiraPlan to a large, multinational life sciences manufacturing company. During the series of demonstrations and proof concepts, we configured SpiraPlan for a set of different use cases, including demand management, application portfolio management, vendor selection and management, change management, application decommissioning, configuration management, and supplier qualification. In this series of articles, we will be highlighting these different use cases and providing best practices and ideas for how to configure SpiraPlan. In this article we will be covering the topic of configuration management and change management.
Using SpiraPlan for Vendor Selection & Management
July 20, 2022
We recently demonstrated SpiraPlan to a large, multinational life sciences manufacturing company. During the series of demonstrations and proof of concepts, we configured SpiraPlan for a set of different use cases, including demand management, application portfolio management, vendor selection and management, change management, application decommissioning, configuration management, and supplier qualification. In this series of articles, we will be highlighting these different use cases and providing best practices and ideas for how to configure SpiraPlan. In this article we will be covering the topic of vendor selection and management.
Read MoreUsing SpiraPlan for Demand Management
May 25, 2022
We recently demonstrated SpiraPlan to a large, multinational life sciences manufacturing company. During the series of demonstrations and proof concepts, we configured SpiraPlan for a set of different use cases, including demand management, application portfolio management, vendor selection and management, change management, application decommissioning, configuration management, and supplier qualification. In this series of articles, we will be highlighting these different use cases and providing best practices and ideas for how to configure SpiraPlan. In this article we will be covering the topic of demand management.
Read MoreSpotlight on Spira 6.14 - Inline Editing on Gantt Charts
November 22, 2021
The next release of SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan includes some major enhancements for planning and managing waterfall and/or hybrid projects. We introduced the new Gantt chart views of Releases and Tasks in Spira v6.5 with the ability to simply view the Releases and Tasks as items in a read-only Gantt chart view. In the upcoming release, we have added inline editing capabilities, so you can edit Releases and Tasks in the Gantt chart views, and also edit the Releases in the Pert hierarchical view as well.
Read MoreImplementing Waterfall for Execution and Management Teams in SpiraPlan
July 21, 2021
Although businesses adopt agile practices to embrace change and respond to market needs, there is still a need for organizations to stay faithful to a set of principles and ideas that come from traditional waterfall project management. After all, if the good lessons learned from waterfall approaches, such as thinking of the milestones for payment terms, procuring resource commitments earlier to avoid delays in ongoing commitments, evaluating risks that challenge existing or future commitments, and technical architecture with scalability in design, are ignored, are we truly adaptive in strategic execution?
Read MoreSpira for Non-Software Applications: Covid-19 Mask Testing | InflectraCon 2020 IRL
October 30, 2020
Our annual user conference - InflectraCon 2020: Agile Software Testing & DevOps Conference is in the rearview mirror. Today, we are proud to present the Inflectra In Real Life (IRL) talk by our partner sponsor - NVP Software Solutions, called Spira for Non-Software Applications: Covid-19 Mask Testing.
The session focuses on how Spira supports the testing of Covid-19 masks under varying conditions and the transit application.
Enjoy the recording below!
Read MoreSimplifying Test Estimation | InflectraCon 2020 IRL
October 29, 2020
We have recently hosted Inflectra's annual user conference - InflectraCon. In 2020, we have dedicated InflectraCon to Agile Software Testing and DevOps theme and held it virtually. InflectraCon 2020 combined multiple tracks, of which, one - called Inflectra in Real Life or IRL in short - showcased the various uses of the Inflectra platforms (SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, SpiraPlan, Rapise, Kronodesk, etc).
Inflectra is happy to present an InflectraCon 2020 IRL talk by our friend from far away New Zealand - Geoff Horne. In the session, Geoff demonstrates an Excel-based tool for estimating software testing projects.
Read MoreNew Ways To Use Project Management Software for More Efficient Projects
April 1, 2020
Project management software has been around long enough that it’s fairly ubiquitous for businesses of all types. Teams from sales and marketing to manufacturing and software development use project management software to organize the myriad moving parts of business projects. But modern project management software doesn’t stop at tracking projects. Valuable features and reporting built right into today’s PM platforms make it easy for teams to use the software to help them build better processes, save time, and increase profitability across an organization.
Read MoreProduct Management versus Project Management
December 24, 2018
As I was concluding a capstone class on project management, there was a question from a few students on whether there is any scope of career growth for project management as a profession with the increased focus on agile principles. Questioning further on the root cause of this concern was the fact that agile approaches, such as Scrum, does not call for a project manager role and the focus is only on product management. In a brief attempt to address this ongoing confusions thinking product and project management are mutually exclusive disciplines with product management slaying the project management field, I explain here the ongoing need for the symbiotic relationship between these two disciplines.
Read MoreWhy Executives Need to Understand Program & Project Management?
December 17, 2018
As a firm believer in continuous improvement, I have always been monitoring the external environment to find new trends and equip myself with this knowledge. One of these interests was understanding more about Program and Portfolio Management.
Read MoreExtend Your Project Management Strategy Beyond The Dev Team
July 5, 2018
When it comes to project management strategies, most people think of development teams.
Whether they’re focused software, websites, inventory, or any number of items, the intricacies of successfully developing a viable product require stringent tracking. There are many phases between brainstorming and product launch, most of which generally consist of numerous smaller tasks, which can be broken down into several more specific tasks. With so many hands in the honey pot, disorganization quickly leads to sticky situations.
This post, however, is not about development teams. It’s about introducing project management to the rest of your company to help clear up and prevent sticky situations.
Read MoreThe Curse of the Middle Choice - Why SpiraTeam Has 4 Priorities
August 25, 2017
Customers sometimes ask us why we chose four priorities, severities and importance values in SpiraTeam. Now you can of course customize the system to change the priorities and severities but this article explains why we chose four and why you might want to keep them.
Read MoreRecording of Agile Project Management Webinar using SpiraPlan
July 21, 2017
Many of our customers choose SpiraPlan or SpiraTeam because they are using agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban and need a powerful tool to manage their project backlogs, releases, sprints, iterations and programs. They are often using different tools for planning, bug tracking and requirements which hampers the ability to see the status of their project in one place.
Read MoreManagement Debt: The Costs of Non-delivery and Non-conformance
February 7, 2017
The principles of lean have always focused on maximizing the value delivery. In fact, the Japanese term Muda (Arnheiter & Maleyeff, 2005) refers to the seven different types of wastes that one should remove. In this guest post from our agile transformation partner Sriram Rajagopalan, we discuss the types of waste that can be eliminated using a Lean methodology, and the role of Management Debt in perpetuating wasteful practices.
Read MoreSpira 5.1 - Cross Project Associations
November 3, 2016
One of the key new features is that you can share artifacts between different projects. This is useful for customers that have projects in Spira that contain requirements for core components that can be reused by other projects that are composed of those core components.
We Need More Process and Less Pain
October 6, 2016
I had an interesting discussion with a prospective client last week - they were using another planning tool (Microsoft TFS) and were looking for a tool that would give them a more structured process, but had an easier to use, less painful UI.
SpiraTeam & SpiraPlan Instant Messenger
June 9, 2016
In this second post about new features released in SpiraTeam 5.0 we discuss enhancements to the built-in instant messenger. We would love to hear what you think, including about our plans for further messaging improvements.
Why Time Spent is Not the Same as Work Done!
March 3, 2016
One of the questions we get frequently asked is - how do the various effort fields in Spira work? Specifically - if I have an estimated effort of 10 hours but the actual effort is 5 hours, how come it doesn't show 50% completed. This blog post explains the fields in Spira and why time spent does not always (or often) equate to how much work has been done!
To Diagram or Not to Diagram?
February 5, 2016
Some people think in fully-formed and eloquent prose (like Supreme Court Justices). The rest of us either think in shorter-form lists and phrases, or visually with pictures. We want to know if our users would benefit from richer integration and use of visual tools and diagrams in SpiraTeam.
The Value of Face Time?
November 13, 2015
We recently had our development and testing team for Rapise come together for a collaborative planning section. Our company is based in Silver Spring, a suburb of Washington, DC but we have team members working remotely in other countries as well. The occasion made us think about the benefits and limitations of modern collaboration tools.
One Throat to Choke - Why We Only Allow One Owner
August 11, 2015
People often email us to ask if it is possible to have more than one owner in SpiraTeam when assigning a requirement, test case, incident or task. They also often ask us why we named the field 'owner' rather than 'assignee'. Well these two decisions were actually thoughtfully made and not just at random.
The Meaning of ‘Done’
June 19, 2015
“Is it done?” A question with possibly dangerous answers, at least where cooking is concerned. With software development an incorrect “Yes” could mean customers get low quality, buggy software Read More
Agile Project Management with SpiraPlan & SpiraTeam
May 25, 2015
Are you planning on moving to an agile methodology such as Scrum or Kanban? Are you already using agile methods but need a better way to scale your process? This article explains how SpiraPlan and SpiraTeam can help you better plan, estimate and manage your agile projects. Read More
User Story Normalization
April 24, 2015
Traditional software development estimating techniques are slow, long lasting exercises and as such are totally unsuited to Agile processes. New methods of estimating have emerged which fit the Agile model, requiring minimal effort to provide ‘just enough’ information to support prioritization and decision making. The popular unit of measurement for Agile sizing is the Story Point. Read More
Agile - Is Constant Process Improvement Imperative?
November 12, 2014
In this post we continue our examination of various Agile methodology ideas and ask whether they are valid or whether they are in fact, industry myths. Next on the chopping block - do you need to have constant process improvement to be agile? Read More
Estimating Agile Projects
August 26, 2014
Traditional software development estimating techniques are slow, long lasting exercises and as such are totally unsuited to Agile processes. New methods of estimating have emerged which fit the Agile model, requiring minimal effort to provide ‘just enough’ information to support prioritization and decision making. The popular unit of measurement for Agile sizing is the Story Point. Read More