Tools used in Software Engineering life cycle

Requirements:
This can be done thru the writing Functional Requirements Document. Tools like MS word, open office etc can be used.
With the Agile programming there are some tools like Rally software. https://community.rallydev.com/slm/login.op

Analysis and Design:
Visio is one of the tool, which has capability of writing Flow chart, Sequence Diagrams etc.

Implementation:
IDE : Eclipse, (Europa or Ganymede ) combines all the J2ee specific modules to develop applications.

Testing :
QA and UAT : To track the functional testing, we are using JIRA.

Software Configuration Management :
Perforce , SVN

Build and Continuous Integration:
Maven, Bamboo

Issue Tracking:
JIRA

Project Management :
https://community.rallydev.com/slm/login.op

Meetings in Agile Methodology

Meetings are crucial for project execution. In some of the projects, it may be time consuming, end up in wastage of time. Some are may be simply arguing, analysis paralysis meetings, there wont be be any outcome of the meetings.

Daily Standup meeting:

This is to sync up with the team about how are we progressing ? are there any hurdles, spikes in the project can be bought up. As the name suggest this done daily. One way to get to know the progress everyday.

Iteration meeting:

This will start at each iteration, to finalize on the stories which needs to done as part of the iteration.

Mid Iteration Meeting:

This will be done at the mid of the iteration, to know how is iteration are progressing. This will help in prioritizing the stories , any high priority story can rescheduled.

Release Planning Meeting:

To list down the stories for the release. It involves BA, QA and developers to know, what is important for the release.

Release Planning

Release Planning in also one of the important for the Release. This indicates the type of Releases like General Availability (GA), Tech Preview (TP), Beta Releases, etc.

The first thing strikes to us is the Time. When are we planning to release. Typically , It will be 3 months release. This will be used for the Iteration Planning.

JIRA – for Issue Tracking

These are my experiences with JIRA for the Development Activity used for the issue tracking in our project.

About the Project, Team and Environment:

There were various teams like the web-app team, db team, ERP team, QA team, Integration team. There were issues from the various team and short releases almost daily release based on the criticality of the issue.

We need to handle Releases on different Environment (DEV,QA,UAT, Production)

For Developer : Each developer needs to know, what are assigned bug to them and start working on that.

For Manager: The manager needs to know, when the issue are getting resolved and going in which build the fix is done.

IT team: The IT head needs to track from the overall project tracking.

How JIRA is used:

Dashboard : JIRA provides a dashboard feature, each individual create their own dashboard about there issues and track them. This can be customizable by adding their own portlets into the dashboard.

Filters : we can create filters , to track the issues.

Subscribing : We can subscribe to the Filters. We will know, if there issues are shared between 2 different groups.

Watch: We can add watch list of the issues, some this is useful incase of clarification from different team and bug fix dependent on the other team.