We have always had an agile development process with continuous updates of our control panel and intranet, but our process was never really formal. So our CTO, Frank Cheung, made a decision to start using TeamPulse and for our dev team to become more agile in a more formalized way.
The TeamPulse product helps us keep to a scheduled sprint. Nowadays, our team has daily stand-up scrum meetings and uses planning poker. Of course, we are still learning, improving and evolving our agile development processes but for the most part it is helping us gain productivity.
So you may be asking why a non-developer like me is blogging about TeamPulse? Well, I became a fan of TeamPulse exactly because a non-dev person like me can be involved in the development process. And I can contribute to the development process without bogging the process down.
Let me explain.
One of the cool features of TeamPulse is the idea board. It’s an area where I can post an idea, feedback or feature request. What I post doesn’t have to be technical – just the high level idea of something that would be cool to get done. These ideas can be broken down into tasks later by people that are more technical than I am. The project manager can get the various tasks assigned to devs as part of a future sprint.
The powerful thing is allowing me to have a formal place to put down ideas and organize them. Prior to using TeamPulse, I would need to keep a list of ideas myself (and you can imagine many of them just being lost) or I’d email someone about an idea but there was no formal way to track it and no easy way to get the idea into our development work pipeline.
The other thing that I like is getting more analytical insight into our development processes – with information about burndown and velocity. This helps us improve our development cycle continuously.
So being a fan of TeamPulse, I’m also glad to announce that Telerik has agreed to provide our customers with a 15% discount on their TeamPulse product for the month of November. Here’s a coupon code that you can use to get this limited time deal on TeamPulse.
TEAMCOU-QTWUZZ
Remember this coupon is only good until November 30, 2011.