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If you’re looking to use project management tools for your development teams, there are a few specific features you need to look out for.
Project management is a must for many businesses because it makes workflow more manageable, repeatable, and efficient. When you start looking for a project management platform, you’re going to find a ton of possibilities, all of which offer a variety of features. One thing to keep in mind is that different departments will likely need a unique set of features from this project management platform. So when looking for a tool to meet the needs of your development teams, what features should you consider must-haves?
Let’s take a look at a few of these features.
TO SEE: Business Leaders as Developers: The Rise of No-Code and Low-Code Software (Free PDF) (TechRepublic)
Task management
Your development teams will need a solid task management option. This can take the form of a kanban board (which is still a favorite among developers) or Gantt charts. Given the two, you’re probably better off with kanban because it’s much easier to use and gives you better insight into the progress of each task. Your project management platform should allow your development teams to easily track tasks.
This feature will be the main tool used by developers in your project management suite. The good news is that most project management tools include task management. If you find a PM tool that doesn’t include task management, keep looking.
File sharing
Development teams constantly share files. Of course, the majority of developer sharing will be handled through a tool like Git (because that’s the nature of development, and it’s the most popular versioning system on the planet). However, development teams don’t just share code. They may need to share documents, images, videos and more.
In addition to this, your developers may also need to share files with other teams (who are not developers) who will not have access to corporate git repositories. So when looking for a project management tool, make sure your choice includes built-in file sharing.
Schedule management
Developers are incredibly busy and very often run into deadlines. For this reason (and your company’s need to ship on time), your project management platform should include a schedule management feature. By using schedule management in your project management software, you can integrate it with other tools (such as task management). This integration will go a long way in making the workflow efficient and reliable. On top of that, with schedule maintenance being part of your project management platform, other teams can track the progress of a project, who’s working on what, when to expect work. completed and even the ability to modify developer schedules as project goals evolve.
Reports and Analytics
While reports and analytics may not be the most useful tools for your developers, they will be very useful for other teams and management. You want to find a project management tool that gives you easy access to reports and analytics, so all stakeholders are kept up to date on how things are progressing. This feature will also improve the development lifecycle by finding bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the workflow.
Bug, error and issue tracking
While you may be tempted to use a separate tool for tracking bugs, errors, and issues, if you can find a project management platform with this functionality built in, your teams will be better off for it. The main reason you might want to add such a feature to your project management platform is that it can integrate with other features and even be automated so that a bug can be automatically assigned to a developer. and added as a task.
Scrum boards
A Scrum board serves as a visual status for your developers’ sprints and shows all the work, broken down into the different stages of the workflow. If your development teams are focused on agility, scrum boards should be considered an absolute must. Having both scrum and kanban boards can be very beneficial, as kanban gives you more latitude, while scrum gives you a lot more organizational structure and is better suited to teams that do sprints. Having both can be a must, especially when some teams focus on agile development and others on a more traditional workflow.
Third-party integrations
Having third-party integrations only matters if you actually use third-party tools. If your development teams depend on Slack, you might want to look for a project management platform that includes Slack integration. There are also project management platforms (such as Asana, ClickUp, Jira, and Monday.com) that even integrate with GitHub. When you start shopping for a project management tool, be sure to compile a list of third-party tools that your developers consider must-haves.
There you have it: the features you should look for in a project management platform designed specifically for development teams. Of course, your mileage may vary and each company/team is unique. But consider these options as a possible benchmark for what your developer-centric project management tool should be.
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