8 Agile Software Development Tools We Just Can’t Live Without

Although it may be tempting to pay for all of them, getting an app for everything can be highly counterproductive. Your team might end up being tangled up with app notifications, instead of these tools helping them simplify their work. At NaNLABS we’ve used several Agile project management tools and we’ll pass on this knowledge to you. In this piece, we’ll share the eight Agile software development tools for successful project delivery we couldn’t live without.

Want to know which Agile project management tools to implement in your business and improve your processes? Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why Agile?

• The benefits of choosing the right tool for your Agile software development project

• Our favorite Agile software development tools

• Closing thoughts 

• Frequently Asked Questions about Agile Software Development Tools

Ready to build your own custom software with a team that cares about you and your processes? We’re not code monkeys, we care about you.  Get in touch. We don’t byte!

Why Agile? 

The concept of Agile hit the workforce in 2001, which means Agile has been making its way through tech and non-tech companies for the past 21 years. Business leaders from all over the world choose to follow this methodology because it invites collaborators to have freedom within a framework. People are encouraged to iterate on their processes, find areas of improvement, and achieve better and faster results.  

Also, Agile software development frameworks focus on reviewing workflows periodically to identify issues and improve as you go. Unlike traditional methodologies that rarely review work as it progresses.  

NaNLABS is one of the top custom software development agencies in Argentina. We serve companies from all over the world, and we differentiate from others because we truly care about our clients and their projects. The way we can guarantee we’ll constantly deliver high-quality results is by being iterative and flexible on workflows, processes, and stories. In other words, by being Agile.

We choose to be Agile every day. In our stand-ups, whenever we modify a priority on ClickUp, or when we come up with a plan to identify bottlenecks. The key to Agile project management is to find the right balance between focusing on the big picture and iterating on the details.

The Agile manifesto.

Agile is much more than a work methodology. It doesn’t matter if you follow Scrum, Kanban, or lean, once you start to incorporate Agile in your day-to-day, you’ll find it useful in most areas of your life. 

The Agile manifesto is meant to serve as a guide for Agile users. It contains four values and twelve principles that will help technical teams uncover better ways to collaborate as a team. The Agile methodology values these four:  

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

• Responding to change over following a plan

The way to read this part of the manifesto is by acknowledging that lean, scalable, and functional code (working software) will always be more valuable than a file with 10x more lines of code with comments and documentation (comprehensive documentation). The Agile manifesto also includes twelve principles that foster: 

• Customer satisfaction

• Project iteration at any stage

• Scalable and functional programs

• Team collaboration and real-time communication

• Team motivation and growth opportunities

• Technical excellence and predictable delivery times

The benefits of choosing the right tool for your Agile software development project

Choosing the right Agile project management tools will help you reach even seemingly unattainable goals. Especially, when you use them throughout the Agile software development lifecycle. 

Finding the right tools to keep track of Agile software development metrics will positively impact your business results. Some benefits you’ll perceive include: 

• Time and budget management improvement. You can improve your ability to predict delivery times on each task by tracking workflows, cycle times, velocity charts, and epics. Having a better project estimation will allow you to set budgets that are closer to reality. 

• Stakeholders engagement. Agile project management tools help you improve reporting and communication with your team and clients. It helps them iterate and make changes as needed in the workflow making stakeholders feel engaged and accountable. 

• Transparency. Agile development tools make processes crystal clear to everyone involved. Clients can find these tools particularly useful for remapping prioritization in a custom software development process. 

• Problem-solving improvement. These tools can easily add tags to tasks or people who are being bottlenecks or blockers. Having a visual representation of those issues can help your team brainstorm and find timely possible solutions. 

• Higher quality. Agile software development tools foster changes and iterations to reach the best possible outcome. These tools make it easy to move tasks to the right stage, review documentation, and notify watchers and task owners. 

• Risk mitigation. By having a workflow with multiple iterations, your Agile tools can help you spot mistakes promptly, and reduce risk. 

• Morale improvement. Your team will feel engaged if everyone is involved, accountable, and encouraged to participate. Using Agile collaboration tools can make everyone's  ideas feel welcome. 

Our 8 favorite Agile software development tools

At NaNLABS we use Agile software development tools to manage our internal workflow, communicate with teammates and clients, and collaborate with one-and-other. These are Agile development tools we recommend. 

1. Jira: best for issue tracking and project management for enterprise teams

This tool is owned by Atlassian, they offer a large set of products to help Agile teams plan, collaborate, and build products. Jira Software is one of the most popular tools for project and issue tracking. It’s particularly useful for user stories, epics, and bug tracking. This Agile development tool is mostly used by development teams and not necessarily by other business departments. 

Most of our clients use Jira, so we’ve grown fond of it. We use it to track the workflow of a project, assign tasks, set priorities, identify blockers, generate dependencies, and keep track of solutions.

One of the things we love the most about Jira is that we can choose the type of Agile methodology we want to organize our projects. You can choose if you want to see dashboards in a Kanban-style, Scrum view, or a hybrid of both. Axosoft is a similar tool to Jira. 

2. GitHub: best for technical tools, and software collaboration

This Microsoft platform allows developers to host code, program versions, and collaborate with other developers. GitHub is an open-source platform, which means it's free and anyone can contribute to improvements. GitHub uses Git to host users’ source code and version history. 

We use GitHub for storing versions of code and learning from the community. There are more than 73 million users on this platform to help you answer questions, bugs, and give you ideas for improvement. 

We love the active collab community on GitHub. We believe it promotes a true Agile spirit. Also, we love the Git-Jira integration that allows us to add branches and commits to the Jira workflow.

3. AWS Amplify: best for technical tools

This platform provides a large set of purpose-built tools to help developers build full-stack cloud-hosted web and mobile apps in record time. AWS Amplify allows you to write the back-end of your applications, and easily structure the front-end by using their UI drag-and-drop components. 

Since AWS Amplify hosts apps in the AWS cloud, its solutions are highly scalable and easy to update. We use it to develop native apps with React Native, build web platforms reusing common UI components, and build back-end infrastructure that’s lightweight yet powerful. 

We love that with AWS Amplify we can access an open-source library, store and sync data with a secure cloud like AWS, and create a very positive software development experience for our teams. 

4. ClickUp: best for task management, custom workflows, documentation, and team communication 

ClickUp can be your biggest ally and, at NaNLABS, we rely on it to help our team collaborate and manage projects. But it’s much more than that. ClickUp is user-friendly and allows teams to write product documentation and store it within a project, communicate with others, add comments to tasks, and convert comments into tasks. 

You can also use ClickUp to have a visual record of who’s available and share team milestones. Margarita Peluffo, our Project Manager, says she can’t live without ClickUp, “I track through it. I include everything from projects, tasks, reminders, meeting notes. I even have my own ClickUp account for personal stuff.”

ClickUp also creates great automation for recurring tasks. Plus, with ClickUp you can see your tasks in different views and Agile frameworks. You can visualize Kanban and Scrum boards. 

ClickUp is the Agile project management tool we use internally at NaNLABS. We adore it. It’s one of those tools that actually help take work off your plate. Also, we love that we can use ClickUps templates but also create our own to meet our needs. Other similar Agile development tools are Monday.com, Trello, and Asana.

5. MURAL: best for team collaboration

This is a platform meant for visual team collaboration. MURAL gives the team access to white canvases for them to create and ideate visually and collaboratively. It’s a great way of doing virtual brainstorming. 

Due to the flexibility of the platform, you can use MURAL to lead and record activity in daily scrums, do sprint planning, do mind maps, conduct retrospectives, sketch Gantt charts, and more.

We use it for team collaboration in meetings. We love it because it’s a great way for everyone to add their ideas to the whiteboard while discussing them in real time.

6. LucidChart: best for team collaboration

This tool is a smart diagram app that fosters teamwork. LucidChart offers different templates to use as a base to create your own organization charts, visual roadmaps, mind maps, and more. 

We use it to keep track of our internal processes, organizational documents like org charts, and Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. We especially value how easy it is to create architectural, class, and sequence diagrams in LucidChart.

What we love about it is that everyone can leave comments on diagrams, add smart links, create their own workflows, and scale them as we grow. 

7. Slack: best for team communication

Slack has grown so much that it’s become a verb.

“Slack me”.

 “I’ll Slack you as soon as I’m available”. 

“Please, Slack me if it’s urgent”. 

It's no accident, Slack is an excellent tool for team communication. Slack is much more than a corporate chat. This tool allows you to communicate with teammates and clients either by chat, video, or call. It also lets you create topical channels to segment the type of information you’re sending and receiving.

We use it for day-to-day communication and to get fast approvals or answers. We love that it integrates with ClickUp because Slack comments can be turned into ClickUp tasks in a few clicks. You can also send ClickUp reminders through Slack. 

Another Slack feature we love (and encourage everyone to use within the NaNLABS team) is the option to schedule messages and send in the recipient's working hours. Sending messages at appropriate times improves work-life balance. “I love the scheduling feature. It allows me to type messages whenever I remember and I can make sure it gets delivered when the other person is online,” says Daiana Del Castillo, our UX/UI designer at NaNLABS. 

8. Planiketa: best for planning, research, and employee assessments. 

Planiketa is a custom Agile software development tool we’re developing to solve three company needs: Planning Poker, assessment surveys, and engineering team retrospectives. Planning Poker is a gamified way to do project planning that we use for our estimations. 

Planiketa is proof that even with multiple Agile tools available, sometimes you need a customized solution that integrates with other tools. Some features are still in development, but we use Planiketa constantly for internal projects and will soon offer it to our clients.

Closing thoughts 

It can take time to become an expert in the Agile software development tools you choose for your business. That’s why you need to make sure you’re spending your time incorporating the right ones. 

All the Agile software development tools we mentioned in this piece can add value to your business. However, keep in mind that having too many tools is counterproductive because it confuses your team members and causes them to duplicate effort to input the same information in the different apps. That process gets harder as your business grows. 

Telling you which Agile software development tools to use is not a good solution. Instead, we recommend you list your needs, and which of the ones we shared can meet those. Also, if you need extra help, we offer expert consultation services to solve complex problems and analyze your data.

Ready to build your own custom software with a team that cares about you and your processes? We’re not code monkeys, we care about you.  Get in touch. We don’t byte!