Kovair Agile Solutions support the following Artifacts/ Entities/ Objects:

• Projects – contains multiple Releases
• Releases – contains multiple Sprints
• Sprints – With multiple durations from 1 week to 6 weeks
• Product Backlogs – Categorized as Epic, Features, User stories
• Daily Scrum Meeting – In a distributed development daily SCRUM meeting happens remotely even sometime asynchronously. Kovair implementation of virtual daily SCRUM meeting captures all the major meeting aspects.
• Test Cases – Implementing more traditional Test Management approaches integrated with Agile methodology to enforce testing of selected Product Backlog by Traceability Relations.
• Issues/ Changes – a complete Issues management solution integrated with Agile methodology including custom visual issues process design and implementations

 

Artifact Management: Kovair

Releases: Kovair Agile Solution supports multi-Sprint Releases. The Backlog items belong to multiple Releases and multiple Sprints. The total estimated efforts are summed up at each Sprint and Release level. A Roadmap report shows Backlog items in a Hierarchy of Release and Sprints.

Backlogs: The Backlog Items are assigned to different users independent of their locations. Kovair Agile Solution being 100% browser based, any user can access it from anywhere, anytime. Reports show Backlog items grouped by Release, Sprint and Assigned Users.

Sprints: A Release consists of multiple Sprints. Each Sprint consists of multiple Backlog items. Each Backlog Item has an assigned user and estimated effort. Kovair Agile Solution calculates the Sprint start and finish dates based on the included Backlogs. The Backlog items may be moved from one Sprint to another to manage the Sprint schedule.

Issues and Change: Kovair Agile Solution has a built-in Issue/Change management which allows users and project members to enter various Backlogs as Issues/ defects/ change and enhancement requests. Kovair's industry leading process engine allows routing of these items through appropriate workflows based on the Backlog types. In addition the various Backlogs can be imported from MS Word, Excel documents, parsed from Email and submitted from different websites integrated with Kovair.

Risks: Kovair Agile Solution includes a separate Risk Management feature using which Risks can be entered, Tracked and related to Backlog Items.

Traceability Relationships

Using Kovair's industry leading Requirements Traceability Relation, feature linking can be done between User Stories, between User Stories and other Backlog items, Sprints and Risks.

The following screenshot displays Kovair Traceability View by which users can get a complete visibility to all the artifacts that are linked to one another.

Versioning Backlog Items 

Kovair has built-in versioning and also implicit and explicit locking mechanism. Built-in versioning allows tracking of all previous versions, comparison between two versions, a version diagram to show the progression, cloning of artifacts, branching and merging of versions.

Collaboration 

Ranking of a Backlog Item: Kovair Agile Solution has a collaborative ranking tool which allows multiple users to rate each backlog item in a 1 to 10 scale against various business values. Based on various ratings from multiple users, Kovair automatically calculates a normalized score for each Backlog which can be used for prioritizing Backlog. 
Collaborating concurrently with Kovair Tasks: Kovair Agile Solution has built-in task management. Tasks can be created manually or automatically by Kovair's Process and Policy engines. In Kovair Tasks are linked to various Artifacts e.g. Backlog, Issues, and Defects, enabling users to access the information of the Artifacts directly from the Task. Each Task may be assigned to multiple owners. Kovair supports three multi-owner Task Assignment Policies - 'Queued', 'One Task for All' and 'Independent Tasks'. ‘Queued tasks’ mean any one user can become the owner and the Tasks from the other users’ home page will be removed by the system. ‘One Task for All’ means multiple owners work together on a single item. ‘Independent’ means each user works on the same artifact independent of each other but in parallel. 
Kovair includes a built-in Timesheet module. Users can enter actual time spent for each task using this Timesheet. 
The following screenshot shows a list of Kovair Tasks for the respective Owners, which were generated from various workspaces.

Multi-threaded Discussions among the Stakeholders 

A primary activity of any team is to make a series of decisions based on comments and opinions of its members. Multi-threaded discussions allow one to capture a complete history (and hence the intellectual property) of the decision making process. 
Kovair supports multi-threaded discussions in terms of Contextual Comments. Its built-in Comments section, with system pre-defined and custom defined forms, enables users to carry out multi-threaded discussions in the context of each Backlog either as a New Comment or Reply to an existing comment. Comments can be in the form of rich text with all sorts of formatting and even embedded images. Kovair allows users to include multiple attachments to their comments. The attachments can be – simple Notes, any type of Files (Word document, spreadsheet, image etc.) and URL. These multi-threaded discussions are saved in the context of the version of a Backlog.

Automation 

Process Automation: Kovair has the industry- leading Omniprocess Process Engine. Using a drag-and-drop graphical designer, an Agile process can be designed, implemented, enforced and automated. The process will automatically create Tasks for one or more users based on Roles they play. When the tasks are completed, the process creates a new set of tasks for a new set of users. The following is a screenshot of a User Story process.

Automation through Policy: In Kovair advanced notification Policies can be set with custom email content with embedded macro variables for the Artifact meta data. The notifications are generated in the context of Artifacts and Tasks.

Reporting 

Kovair Agile Solution includes multiple reporting engines - HTML, Crystal, Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. Both textual and graphical metric reports can be displayed on custom Dashboards. Each user can have several custom Dashboards based on his/ her role.

Graphical Chart- Tracking of Completed Backlog Items

Textual Report on Status for Scrum Meetings

Graphical Distribution Report

Custom Fields 

A large number of custom fields of various types can be created for all entities, including User Stories.

Integration with external tools using Kovair Omnibus 

Kovair’s Omnibus Integration bus Platform technology allows integration of various third party and in-house development tools with the Agile Solution. The following shows the list of adapters available for Agile Solution today.