7 awesome tools for agile design and development collaboration
Software development, scrum project management, design collaboration apps and prototyping tools that will help your agile teams get on the same page
In Agile software development, design and development teams often need to work together to build great products. Successful collaboration in Agile leads to better results: fewer misunderstandings in project hand-off, less rework and ultimately smarter delivery of products.
But getting designers and developers on the same page isn’t always easy. Above all, successful collaboration between agile scrum teams requires the right tools. In this post, we dive into 7 of the top collaboration software, apps and tools that will help your scrum teams join forces.
Asana for task and workflow management
Asana is a leading task and project management tool for web and mobile. The tool helps different scrum teams organize projects by centralizing daily tasks and providing teams with a portal to view the status of jobs without having to screen hop.
Design and development teams can track requests for each project, assign people work and set priority levels for each request. This helps teams streamline handoff after the software definition phase, make creative goals clear and build out workflows that align with each scrum’s capacity.
With Asana, scrum teams can also create a product roadmap to maintain a clear picture of the project’s milestones and plan out their sprints more efficiently. It’s a powerful asset for scrum project management.
Read up on how to prototype innovative project management software in our interview with Asana’s UI Designer, Marcos Medina.
Pricing: $9.99 a month + free version
Justinmind for agile software definition
We don’t like to blow our own horn, but we think Justinmind might just be the leading prototyping tool for web and mobile applications, and software and a top agile team collaboration tool.
Why? Because with the developer-friendly UI, designers and developers are always in sync. Designers use Justinmind to create wireframes and interactive prototypes, but also as a collaboration app to hand off designs to the dev team.
Developers can copy CSS styles, export assets and view the exact measurements of the UI elements in the Justinmind canvas. They can make notes and observations on the prototype and designers can then feed back to them directly within the same tool — both on desktop and mobile devices. This means quicker hand-off, fewer design revisions and less time to delivery.
Find out more about keeping design and dev teams in sync and speeding up workflows with a developer-friendly UI here.
Pricing: from $19 a month + free version
What users are saying: “Our team loves using Justinmind to share ideas, collaborate, test assumptions, and prototype multiple design concepts for our web and mobile applications”
Dropbox for file syncing and document management
Dropbox is a cloud-based file hosting, syncing and sharing service. Designers and developers can send and share files across teams, gather feedback with comments on documents, create a central workspace for assets, and work simultaneously as a team — a powerhouse for organization-wide collaboration.
File sharing is essential to collaboration in agile software development. Whether you’re working a website prototype, specifications document or all-important UI assets, you need to be able to pass your files along to the dev team for their input. Dropbox provides an easy and secure environment for file sharing — making it a powerful collaboration tool for agile teams.
Check out our Q&A with Dropbox’s Design Manager, Anisha Jain, who talks about bringing teams together through prototyping interfaces.
Pricing: from $10 a month + free trial
ProductPlan for agile product roadmapping
ProductPlan is the number one cloud-based product roadmapping tool for visualizing product strategy in real-time.
With ProductPlan, it’s quick and easy to create a roadmap and update it regularly with drag and drop features. This means that everyone can be kept up-to-date on the next step in the journey towards product delivery.
The product roadmap is a great tool for communicating strategy and conveying the big picture in a software development project. With milestones, features and product strategy trackable, agile scrum teams can make better-informed decisions and prioritize their tasks.
Pricing: from $39 a month + free trial
Slack for effortless communication between agile teams
Slack is a team chat app that keeps teams in the know. Agile teams can chat and make calls, personalize conversations, and share files. Chats can be organized across channels for specific departments, projects and topics. The channels are public so that anyone in the team can check out what’s going in a specific thread and easily get up to speed.
Slack is integrated with several other collaboration-enabling tools, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Mailchimp and Twitter — centralizing the workflow and keeping the feedback loop going across teams and resources.
Pricing: from $7.50 a month + free version
Agreedo for productive scrum meetings
Agreedo helps agile teams schedule and organize their scrum meetings, and makes the meetings themselves more productive and worthwhile.
In scrum, agile teams talk about lots of different items and tasks on a daily basis. This means that low-priority items are at risk of falling to the bottom of the product backlog, or even dropped completely. With Agreedo, teams can track topics and outcomes of each daily scrum meeting so that no sprint task is missed. They can also improve the structure of their scrum meetings by recording minutes and sharing them with everyone involved in the project.
Pricing: from $7.90 a month + free version
Atlassian Jira for issue and project tracking
Atlassian Jira is a cross-platform agile software development and team collaboration tool. It helps high-performing agile teams plan and track issues and projects so that they can deliver software on time and frequently.
Jira is built with all team members in mind. From designers and marketing teams to software developers and agile product teams, everyone can get on the same page, and project.
Use it to plan your agile sprints, distribute tasks across teams, prioritize feature releases and collect and evaluate data about team performance and goals.
Learn more about Justinmind for Jira here and catch us at the Atlassian Summit US in September.
Pricing: from $10 a month + free version
Designers are the CSS to the developers’ HTML. Bridge the collaboration gap with the right tool(s) and it’s a match made in heaven.
