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Agilefant Ltd

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This article is about Agilefant software and it’s developer Agilefant Ltd.


Agilefant is a software for Agile product, project or iteration management, a tool for making work visible throughout the organization.

About the software[edit]

Agilefant
Developer(s)Agilefant Ltd
Initial release2008
Engine
    TypeProductivity software
    Websitehttp://www.agilefant.com/

    Search Agilefant on Amazon.

    Agilefant is an open source backlog management tool enhanced with hierarchical requirements handling capabilities. Agilefant provides three different planning levels for backlog management: product, project and iteration backlogs. Agilefant allows users to embrace any of several methodologies for multiple groups and projects, while presenting different views and capabilities to different users, managers, and stakeholders.[1] Requirements can be expressed both in traditional flat-list backlogs, but also in tree form, in order to maintain traceability and transparency.

    Agilefant is suitable not only for organizations with software development or product, project and iteration management needs, but also to organizations with needs to time tracking and reporting, planning and organizing daily work with other team members.

    About the developer[edit]

    Agilefant Ltd
    Native name
    Agilefant Oy
    ISIN🆔
    IndustrySoftware engineering
    Founded 📆October 2013
    Founders 👔
    Headquarters 🏙️Finland
    Area served 🗺️
    Worldwide
    Products 📟 Agilefant (software)
    Members
    Number of employees
    🌐 Websitehttp://www.agilefant.com/
    📇 Address
    📞 telephone

    Agilefant Ltd (in Finnish: Agilefant Oy) is a technology company based in Finland. Agilefant Ltd was founded in 2013 by a group of researchers who had previously worked together at Aalto University.[2] All of the founders are also Aalto University graduates:

    • Ph.D. Jarno Vähäniitty (Dr. Agilefant) has 14 years experience of studying agile development and is a leading speaker in agile conferences. Vähäniitty is also one of the founding members of Software Process Research Group SPRG, Finland’s leading group on software process research.[3]
    • Iko Rein has a M.Sc. in Computer Science and over 20 years of experience of working at several ICT companies, including MySQL AB, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Solid Information Technology and Futuremark.
    • Santeri Korri has a M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and also long experience with Agile methods.
    • Ville Seppä has a B.Sc. in Computer Science and has a long experience as a lead architect and web developer.[4]

    The office is located in Otaniemi, Espoo, which is one of the Aalto University's campus areas, enabling an innovative work environment. CEO of the company is Iko Rein, who is also one of the co-founders. The domain agilefant.org was registered in 2006.

    Scientific research behind the product[edit]

    SoberIT (Software Business and Engineering institute) which is part of Aalto University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering had started a scientific research to develop a tool to streamline fast-paced software development. The SoberIT's Software Process Research Group performs empirical research on highly relevant software engineering topics in close collaboration with a large network of industrial and academic partners (e.g. Ericsson, F-Secure, Napa, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Steeri, Tekla, TeliaSonera, Tieto, Vaisala).

    According to then project manager, Jarno Vähäniitty, the goal of the research group was to have a tool following modern management methods but still being able to meet the practical everyday challenges. There were plenty of commercial task and time management software on the market, but according to the university study group, they all seem to be missing something. That gave the group an impulse to create a tool of their own. The group had an IT company with turnover 10 million as a case company, and it was calculated to give one million savings per financial year by adapting Agilefant. According to companies like IPSS (now Steeri) and F-Secure, they all have been pleased to have tool that makes creative software development possible.[5]

    During the years, around Agilefant has formed lots of courses in Aalto University, and not only master's and bachelor's theses, but also Agilefant is a proof-of-concept of doctoral dissertation for the Aalto University Doctor of Science in Technology degree by Jarno Vähäniitty.[6]

    Funding[edit]

    The company has been funded by revenue, the founders, seed investors and Tekes (the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation). During years 2014-2015 Agilefant got funding as Tekes' New knowledge and business from research ideas research project.[7] According to Tekes "The scale of the new business for which the preparation of commercialisation aims in the project must be significant[8]" is one of the conditions for research funding.

    Features[edit]

    • Fast and easy product, release and sprint backlog management
    • See who is working on what
    • Plan what you’ll take on next using personal task and story queues
    • Story hierarchies
    • Prioritize stories and tasks using drag-n’-drop
    • Time tracking
    • Project portfolio management
    • Personal workload management
    • Customizable metrics dashboards
    • Access rights
    • Log spent effort to the detail you need – to tasks, stories, iterations, projects
    • Create reports and export timesheet data to Excel
    • Pull stories from many products and projects into a single iteration
    • See total estimated effort left and spent from the burndown
    • Master multi-team projects with parallel iterations
    • Release burn-up shows progress against planned scope
    • If your team is grinding through the daily list of things to do, Agilefant presents itself as a task list
    • If you’re doing project or product management, a hierarchical view shows how small stories and features contribute to higher level product and business goals
    • As a manager, a one-page view of the key performance metrics of various teams and projects to shows if things are on track[9]
    • Scrum support
    • MySQL as its back-end database[10]

    Consepts[edit]

    Agilefant has following hierarchy: Product - Project - Iteration. Products are the highest level construct and may have multiple projects (essentially releases). Each project may have multiple iterations. Each product, project and iteration has its own backlog, and all of these contain stories. Stories may consist of tasks.[11]

    Releaces[edit]

    Agilefant is available both as open source and enterprise version. The first public open source release done in October 2008. Agilefant’s enterprise version is available both as service from the cloud and as an on-premises installation.

    Integrations[edit]

    Late 2015 Agilefant lauched a Trello plugin[12] e.g. to log spent effort, to use sprint burndowns and link customer needs or product and business goals with Agilefant’s Trello Integration. Trello-Agilefant integration makes it possible to:

    • log spent effort to Trello cards and checklist items
    • see sprint burndowns
    • estimate in story points
    • see the progress of longer term endeavors such as projects and releases
    • link cards to higher level business objectives and do roadmapping
    • manage the activities on your Trello boards as a portfolio[13]

    Practical applications of use[edit]

    • Game development when structuring tasks[14]

    Recognition[edit]

    • Agilefant partly been funded by Tekes (the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation). During years 2014-2015 Agilefant got funding as Tekes' New knowledge and business from research ideas research project.[7] Accorging to Tekes "The scale of the new business for which the preparation of commercialisation aims in the project must be significant[8]" is one of the conditions for research funding.
    • Tekes’ Tempo program has chosen Agilefant as one of its favourite from-research-to-business enterprises.[15]
    • Agilefant was mentioned in the executive summary of the 8th State of Agile survey along with FogBugz, Mantis, Redmine, Trac and Trello as one of the emerging tools in the marketplace.[16]
    • Top 5 open source project management tools in 2014[17]
    • 10 Tools To Keep Your Agile Dev Projects On Track[1] by Curtis Franklin Jr
    • TheTopTens.com - Best Agile Project management Tools
    • All the back to 2009, a leading Finnish paper for business and economic news Kauppalehti published a full page article about Agilefant and its software development process called ”Työt hallintaan ilmaisella ohjelmalla” meaning managing work with a free software. SoberIT (Software Business and Engineering institute) which is part of Aalto University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering had started scientifically to develop a tool to streamline fast-paced software development. According to then project manager, Jarno Vähäniitty, the goal was to have a tool following modern management methods but still being able to meet the practical everyday challenges. There were plenty of commercial task and time management software on the market, but according to the university study group, they all seem to be missing something. That gave the group an impulse to create a tool of their own. The group had an IT company with turnover 10 million as a case company, and it was calculated to give one million savings per financial year by adapting Agilefant. According to companies IPSS and F-Secure, they have been pleased to have tool that makes creative software development possible.[5]
    • Progressive Digital Media Technology News 2015 presents Agilefant as one of 5 open source project management tools to help you collaborate.[18]

    Reception[edit]

    Scrum Expert says that Agilefant is "a simple but powerful solution for managing software development projects and related activities. It brings together the perspectives of organizing daily work, long-term product and release planning and project portfolio management."[19]

    Crunchbase says that Agilefant is "the most advanced open source web based tool for agile management today, with a rapidly growing user base and a dedicated community behind it."[20] It foes on to say that "Unlike most tools, Agilefant scales from personal todo-lists to large-scale multi-team development projects and all the way to long-term product and portfolio management..."[20]

    Agilefant was featured in an academic case study on project release management.[21] The authors concluded that "Without the rigorous process and the transparency and wealth of information provided by the tool support, the product owner would have chosen his own, slightly sup-optimal plan alternative having lower overall acceptance."[21]:8

    Events[edit]

    Publications by the founder(s)[edit]

    • J. Vähäniitty. 2012. Towards agile product and portfolio management http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-60-4506-1
    • J. Vähäniitty,. and K. Rautiainen. 2008. Towards a conceptual framework and tool support for linking long-term product and business planning with agile software development. In Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Software development governance (SDG '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25-28. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1370720.1370730
    • L. Lehtola, M. Kauppinen, J. Vähäniitty, M. Komssi. 2009. Linking business and requirements engineering: is solution planning a missing activity in software product companies? In Requirements Engineering (Impact Factor: 0.88). 06/2009; 14(2):113-128. DOI: 10.1007/s00766-009-0078-8
    • J. Vähäniitty, C. Lassenius, K. Rautiainen and P. Pekkanen, "Long-Term Planning of Development Efforts by Roadmapping – A Model and Experiences from Small Software Companies," Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, 2009. SEAA '09. 35th Euromicro Conference on, Patras, 2009, pp. 300–305. doi: 10.1109/SEAA.2009.29
    • J. Vahaniitty, K. Rautiainen and C. Lassenius, "Small software organizations need explicit project portfolio management," in IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 1:1-1:12, March–April 2010. doi: 10.1147/JRD.2009.2038747

    See also[edit]

    References[edit]

    1. 1.0 1.1 "10 Tools To Keep Your Agile Dev Projects On Track - InformationWeek". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2016-03-02.
    2. "Company - Agilefant". Agilefant. Retrieved 2016-03-01.
    3. "Speakers". Agile Coaching & Leadership Academy Finland. Retrieved 2016-03-03.
    4. "Company - Agilefant". Agilefant. Retrieved 2016-03-03.
    5. 5.0 5.1 "Työt hallintaan ilmaisella ohjelmalla" (PDF). Työt hallintaan ilmaisella ohjelmalla. Kauppalehti. October 19, 2009. Retrieved March 3, 2016.
    6. "Towards agile product and portfolio management".
    7. 7.0 7.1 "Avoin tietoaineisto - projektin tiedot". extranet.tekes.fi. Retrieved 2016-03-04.
    8. 8.0 8.1 "New knowledge and business from research ideas | Tekes". www.tekes.fi. Retrieved 2016-03-04.
    9. "Agilefant". SourceForge. Retrieved 2016-03-03.
    10. "Automating Performance Bottleneck Detection using Search-Based Application Profiling" (PDF). Automating Performance Bottleneck Detection using Search-Based Application Profiling. March 5, 2016.
    11. Wazi. "Comparing Open Source Agile Project Management Tools | Linux.com". Linux.com | The source for Linux Information. Retrieved 2016-03-05.
    12. "Agilefant on Twitter". Twitter. Retrieved 2016-03-02.
    13. "Blog - Agilefant". Agilefant. Retrieved 2016-03-03.
    14. "Les difficultés de la production de jeux indie au Québec et l'arrivée de Steam Greenlight: Entrevue avec Louis-Félix Cauchon (Artifice Studio) 3/3". Geeks and Com'. Retrieved 2016-03-05.
    15. "Agilefant - Tekes' Tempo program has chosen Agilefant as... | Facebook". www.facebook.com. Retrieved 2016-03-02.
    16. "8th ANNUAL STATE OF AGILE SURVEY" (PDF). 8th ANNUAL STATE OF AGILE SURVEY. VersionOne Inc. 2014. Retrieved 2016-03-04.
    17. "Top 5 open source project management tools in 2014". Opensource.com. Retrieved 2016-03-02.
    18. "5 open source project management tools to help you collaborate". Progressive Digital Media Technology News 2015. Progressive Digital Media. 19 November 2015.
    19. "Agilefant". Scrum Expert. Retrieved 2 March 2016.
    20. 20.0 20.1 "Agilefant". Cruchbase. Retrieved 2 March 2016.
    21. 21.0 21.1 Heikkilä, Ville; Jadallah, Anas; Rautiainen, Kristian; Ruh, Günther (2010). "Rigorous Support for Fl exible Planning of Product Releases — A Stakeholder-Centric Approach and its Initial Evaluation" (PDF). Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Retrieved 2 March 2016.
    22. "Will you be remembered after Slush?". ArcticStartup. Retrieved 2016-03-05.

    Further reading[edit]

    Theses[edit]

    External links[edit]


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