I’m happy to announce the public release of SonicAgile – an online tool for managing software projects. You can register for SonicAgile at www.SonicAgile.com and start using it with your team today.
SonicAgile is an agile project management solution which is designed to help teams of developers coordinate their work on software projects. SonicAgile supports creating backlogs, scrumboards, and burndown charts. It includes support for acceptance criteria, story estimation, calculating team velocity, and email integration.
In short, SonicAgile includes all of the tools that you need to coordinate work on a software project, get stuff done, and build great software.
Let me discuss each of the features of SonicAgile in more detail.
SonicAgile Backlog
You use the backlog to create a prioritized list of user stories such as features, bugs, and change requests. Basically, all future work planned for a product should be captured in the backlog.
We focused our attention on designing the user interface for the backlog. Because the main function of the backlog is to prioritize stories, we made it easy to prioritize a story by just drag and dropping the story from one location to another.
We also wanted to make it easy to add stories from the product backlog to a sprint backlog. A sprint backlog contains the stories that you plan to complete during a particular sprint. To add a story to a sprint, you just drag the story from the product backlog to the sprint backlog.
Finally, we made it easy to track team velocity — the average amount of work that your team completes in each sprint. Your team’s average velocity is displayed in the backlog. When you add too many stories to a sprint – in other words, you attempt to take on too much work – you are warned automatically:
SonicAgile Scrumboard
Every workday, your team meets to have their daily scrum. During the daily scrum, you can use the SonicAgile Scrumboard to see (at a glance) what everyone on the team is working on. For example, the following scrumboard shows that Stephen is working on the Fix Gravatar Bug story and Pete and Jane have finished working on the Product Details Page story:
Every story can be broken into tasks. For example, to create the Product Details Page, you might need to create database objects, do page design, and create an MVC controller. You can use the Scrumboard to track the state of each task.
A story can have acceptance criteria which clarify the requirements for the story to be done. For example, here is how you can specify the acceptance criteria for the Product Details Page story:
You cannot close a story — and remove the story from the list of active stories on the scrumboard — until all tasks and acceptance criteria associated with the story are done.
SonicAgile Burndown Charts
You can use Burndown charts to track your team’s progress. SonicAgile supports Release Burndown, Sprint Burndown by Task Estimates, and Sprint Burndown by Story Points charts. For example, here’s a sample of a Sprint Burndown by Story Points chart:
The downward slope shows the progress of the team when closing stories. The vertical axis represents story points and the horizontal axis represents time.
Email Integration
SonicAgile was designed to improve your team’s communication and collaboration. Most stories and tasks require discussion to nail down exactly what work needs to be done. The most natural way to discuss stories and tasks is through email. However, you don’t want these discussions to get lost.
When you use SonicAgile, all email discussions concerning a story or a task (including all email attachments) are captured automatically. At any time in the future, you can view all of the email discussion concerning a story or a task by opening the Story Details dialog:
Why We Built SonicAgile
We built SonicAgile because we needed it for our team. Our consulting company, Superexpert, builds websites for financial services, startups, and large corporations. We have multiple teams working on multiple projects.
Keeping on top of all of the work that needs to be done to complete a software project is challenging. You need a good sense of what needs to be done, who is doing it, and when the work will be done.
We built SonicAgile because we wanted a lightweight project management tool which we could use to coordinate the work that our team performs on software projects.
How We Built SonicAgile
We wanted SonicAgile to be easy to use, highly scalable, and have a highly interactive client interface. SonicAgile is very close to being a pure Ajax application.
We built SonicAgile using ASP.NET MVC 3, jQuery, and Knockout. We would not have been able to build such a complex Ajax application without these technologies.
Almost all of our MVC controller actions return JSON results (While developing SonicAgile, I would have given my left arm to be able to use the new ASP.NET Web API). The controller actions are invoked from jQuery Ajax calls from the browser.
We built SonicAgile on Windows Azure. We are taking advantage of SQL Azure, Table Storage, and Blob Storage. Windows Azure enables us to scale very quickly to handle whatever demand is thrown at us.
Summary
I hope that you will try SonicAgile. You can register at www.SonicAgile.com (there’s a free 30-day trial). The goal of SonicAgile is to make it easier for teams to get more stuff done, work better together, and build amazing software. Let us know what you think!
