Requirements Management
How does Mendix support defining requirements and planning?
Development teams need to deliver applications that achieve business objectives from day one while matching and even exceeding users’ needs and expectations. At the same time, the apps must stay current with changes in objectives, requirements, and expectations throughout their lifetime. Therefore, the team needs a thorough understanding of business objectives and user needs.
Assumptions must be validated, feedback must be collected, and misunderstandings must be set straight between the development team, business stakeholders, and key users. This means that the extended team needs an integrated environment where requirements, releases, feedback, and communication are coordinated, and continuous interaction is facilitated.
The Mendix Portal transforms application development by creating a unified space where development teams, stakeholders, and users collaborate effectively. Through its integrated environment, teams can immediately address business objectives while maintaining flexibility for future changes.
A central backlog of user stories serves as a living document where teams capture, discuss, and refine project specifications. Real-time collaboration and continuous feedback ensure that applications evolve in alignment with business needs and user expectations. Mendix helps shorten the feedback loop between development teams, users, and all other stakeholders to drive project success, lower costs, and decrease time to market.
Development cycles become more efficient as communication barriers dissolve and feedback loops shorten. Stakeholders can monitor progress and provide immediate input, while development teams maintain clear sight of business objectives. This seamless interaction reduces costs, accelerates time to market, and ensures applications deliver lasting value throughout their lifecycle.
Agile Planning with Mendix Epics
Mendix offers Epics, a user-friendly agile planning tool tailored for both Scrum and Kanban methodologies. It enables teams to define, prioritize, and refine epics and user stories, allowing for a streamlined workflow. With customizable story statuses and @mentioning for improved communication, Epics ensures that all team members are aligned and engaged in a collaborative manner.
Mendix AI Assistance in Epics
Addressing the persistent challenge of capturing clear and complete requirements, Mendix integrates powerful Mendix AI Assistance (Maia) capabilities into Epics:
- Maia Story Creation: Instantly generates high-quality user stories from brief inputs, adhering to agile best practices for structured, clear, and actionable outputs.
- Maia Story Refinement: Provides AI-powered suggestions to clarify vague goals, add missing acceptance criteria, and ensure consistency across the backlog.
With Maia, teams benefit from enhanced story quality, consistency, and accelerated development, empowering business users to actively contribute to agile planning without needing prior expertise.
Integrated Tools for Seamless Workflow
Epics is also fully integrated with the other tools Mendix offers. Developers can commit stories from Studio Pro and link any commit to the relevant user story in Epics. This helps teams keep track of the features they deliver since the full overview of commits with the links to the right user stories can be found on the Team Server page in the Mendix Portal.
Epics is also integrated with App Insights, the Mendix tool for managing user feedback. With one click, product owners can turn any feedback item into a user story. The original feedback item will contain a link to the newly created story and vice versa. For optimal traceability, the story title will also always contain the unique ID of the feedback item.
Portfolio Management is a tool for defining, prioritizing, and tracking the progress of all initiatives. Business and IT can work together to define high-level requirements.
From there, it is also possible to link epics from one or even multiple apps to a Portfolio initiative. Then, anyone interested in an initiative’s progress can see it at a glance since it is displayed as the number of completed user stories over the total number of stories left.
To sum up, Mendix supports the planning process with Epics, a tool that helps teams follow agile best practices. Epics offers rich integrations with the rest of the platform ensuring Agile planning is embedded in the software development lifecycle end-to-end and is included in all Mendix licenses.
Can changes made in development be traced back to requirements and audited?
Any user story from an active board can be linked to a commit directly in Studio Pro. This enables development teams to go back and check for commits when they need to know when or why a change was made.
Alternatively, developers can review all changes associated with a single user story by checking the Revisions section of that story. If they know which exact story they need to look into, this makes it easy to zoom in, plus it makes reviewing a story easier since it is immediately visible what has been done.
Does Mendix support integration with third-party Agile planning tools?
Yes, if you are already using an agile planning tool such as Jira, Mendix offers an out-of-the-box integration. The Scrum master of any project can set up the connection with a Jira board of their choice, which enables the same integrations as Epics when it comes to linking commits to user stories and creating stories out of feedback items.
If a Jira board is connected to a Mendix project, the link to that board will also be shown in the project-level navigation.
Importantly, the choice between Epics or Jira is set up on the project level, so it is possible to use Epics for some projects and Jira for others. You are in complete control of your planning tools.
When development activities extend to a large number of teams, some organizations require more advanced project management tools and services in addition to Mendix requirements management. For this scenario, Mendix provides APIs for integration with third-party tools and services.