Visibility of the Project Status, Usage of Agile Methods and Tools

Abstract

The aim of the thesis was to study the current ways of using agile methods and practices in the case company and find the ways to improve the current practices, in order to have better visibility of the project status. Accept360 is the tool used for project planning and execution in the case company, hence the study concentrated on understanding the current practices in using the tool and finding out the gaps that exists in the current practices, in comparison with the best practices of using the Agile methods and tools. Agile approaches are used in software development to help businesses respond to unpredictability. To address the uncertainties and have good visibility of the project status, the agile methods provide rules and a standard ways of usage, which would help the project stakeholders to stay updated with the project status.

In the research the best practices in agile method of software development were studied first, and some of the best practices and methods that would best suit the organisation were identified. Next, the current practices were studied in the selected teams in the case organisation, by conducting contact interviews with the key stakeholders, from which the researcher collected information about the current ways of using the agile methods and tools. The interviews also gave information about the opinions about the tool which is being used currently for project planning and execution, how the tool addressed the current needs for project planning and execution and what were the suggestions from the key stakeholders for improving the practices in the tool and methods. The data collected about the current practices was then compared with the best practices and the gaps between them were identified, from which the proposals to improve the visibility of the project situation were created.

The study resulted in three key theme proposals. The first theme is to follow the already agreed practices and guidelines, which is missing currently. The second theme is using the Agile Software Product Management method, and the third theme is implementing Scrumban practice for project planning and execution. The last two themes mainly recommended ways for having a separation between requirement and engineering management. The proposals were found to be very useful input for further process improvements, to have better visibility of the project status and address the current key issues in the case organisation.