Agile development requires agile online tools and solutions to effectively manage projects. The great news is that Mendix has agile principles implemented throughout the whole process to help with agile sprint planning. Thus, you do not need to do a lot of analysis and buy new tools to manage agile projects.

However, if you have already bought other agile tools, such as the popular Jira, you can easily integrate your tools using our APIs. Think of the the Mendix Modeler as a small part of the whole picture in development. The Mendix project environment embraces the agile principles and sprint planning, and is designed for the business and IT to effectively collaborate together. Here are some the most important components of the agile sprint planning process within the Mendix platform.

Team Collaboration

Applications are never developed in a vacuum; it is a team effort. Everyone involved in app development has a different role to play, from agile requirements gathering, to developing, to testing and using the application. Thus, team collaboration is the key to successful development and the most challenging component of agile development.

When you get started with a Mendix project, you can invite team members. Within the platform, you can assign different roles and responsibilities to your team members. Based on the roles, they will have limited or extensive access to the platform components. For example, an end user will only have access to the user story board and can provide feedback on the application. A SCRUM master will have access to everything and be able to make development changes in the Modeler and deploy packages.

In addition, you have full flexibility and can create new roles that are tailored to your organization and project needs. For example, you can create a subject matter expert role or a DevOps engineer and customize exactly what each role should have permissions to.

Agile Team

Sprint and Story Management

The minute you create your first project, you can start capturing requirements. The Stories dashboard is where you will find and manage your sprints. The backlog is where you’ll capture the requirements and the sprints is where you’ll prioritize the stories. When you are rapidly developing apps with Mendix, sprints are 1-2 week development cycles – not the typical 3-4 weeks.

Agile Management

Once you create your first sprint, you can add stories and tasks and assign them to individuals. Each story should follow this format: As a <user type>, I want to <do something>, so that I <business value>.

Underneath each story you can do any of the following:

  • Specify if it’s a feature or a bug
  • Add story points based on story complexity
  • Add labels such as assign it to a person or feature
  • Add more detailed description
  • Add tasks and sub-tasks
  • Mark their status as To-do, Running or Done

User stories

The current Sprint stories are integrated within the development environment. As developer, you can mark the stories as running or done and attach them to each code check-in in the Modeler. Underneath the planning section, you can review the current Sprint Status, Burndown Charts and Release Plans.

Agile Planning

Think of the Mendix platform as the full package for agile sprint planning. Everything within the Developer Portal – such as story management, code check-ins, deployment and DevOps tools, and so on – is designed to help you work as efficiently as possible. Our goal is to remove impediments and ensure that you are rapidly developing apps and communicating effectively across the whole team. In this post, I have highlighted some of the most important components of the agile process within the platform.

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