TAPD and Agile r&d

My first exposure to software development methodology was in the course of software engineering in university. What the teacher told us was the waterfall model, and the graduation project was completed in accordance with the waterfall model. Feasibility study, requirements analysis, basic design, detailed design, coding, testing, maintenance. This development mode is very suitable for traditional large-scale software development. Perfect development process, fine design, detailed documentation, each role plays its own role, has a strong adaptability to software quality and maintenance.

After graduation, I was engaged in Internet work and began to “cultivate” agile research and development. There was some initial resistance to this approach and frequent meetings (morning meetings, requirements reviews, test cases). Requirements change frequently. No time for code quality. When you go into a new project, you need to look at old code to understand the design intent, and it’s a pain to look at someone else’s code. For developers, code without comments and documentation is a pain. In a tight iteration cycle, code design should not worry too much, and repeated changes lead to poor code readability.

Companies exist to make a profit, and the pie is only so big. Agile r&d is more suitable for Internet companies, especially mobile Internet software development. Agile r&d is all about rapid iteration and embracing change. The goal is to satisfy the customer (in terms of user value) and ensure that the software is flexible enough to adapt to a rapidly changing market. In a popular sense, faster adaptation to the market, better money.

On the market, most products suitable for Agile development have been used. Domestic TAPD, Teambition, Tower, Worktile, international Jira, Redmine. The comparison below does not have the meaning of “quarrel”, simply uses the feeling for the author.

Tower and Worktile were used in college to emphasize teamwork. From the functional level, it is suitable for small teams. UI features, lightweight, single page application, small display area. There is no concept of iteration; requirements are presented in the form of tasks. The pro version has video calling, especially for small teams.

Jira is not actually used, no comments, developed by Atlassian. Git client tool SourceTree is also developed by Atlassian, a well-known SaaS service provider.

Redmine, which I used in my internship, emphasizes BUG management. UI features: Old, traditional pages, multi-page applications. The function is simple, direct and fast.

Teambition, played for a period of time. The personal feeling function is between Tower and TAPD. There are different versions, and the simple version does not contain requirements, defects, or iterations. The simple version is expanded in the form of tasks, and the interface is simple. All operations can be completed in a single page. Professional versions (for a fee) have agile concepts like requirements, defects, iterations, etc.

TAPD open product consists of two solutions – lightweight collaboration and agile r&d. Lightweight collaboration: Benchmarker Tower features kanban + cloud documents + enterprise wechat integration to meet the needs of small teams. Agile r&d features include requirements, iterations, defects, test plans/use cases, release reviews, kanban, etc. Overall, agile r&d features (capabilities) are stronger. Overall UI features: more traditional, multi-page application.

Support personal documents, project documents. Documents support online mind mapping, rich text, Office bucket. Mind mapping supports real-time collaboration and conversion to requirements. Documentation supports real-time collaboration and supports Markdown. Companies used to maintain documents in Excel, with no version management and no collaboration. Forwarding each other on IM, version control, inefficient.

Interface documentation, once dominated by MediaWIKI, has a unique syntax that is hard to look at. TAPD wikis support Markdown, which is great to use. Wikis support attachments, which interact with TAPD itself.

Don’t worry about maintenance, don’t worry about documentation.