While Assembla is best known for code repositories, today we’re focusing on the robust project management tool it also offers. Our PM tool supports the Agile framework, with the flexibility to customize Agile processes to best fit your team. Integrating both capabilities allows your development and project management processes to work seamlessly together, making Assembla particularly well-suited for Agile IT project management. If you’re just getting started with Agile, read our other article about How to Choose the Best Agile Framework for Your Team.

Agile Planning with Tickets

In Assembla, Tickets can be Epics, Stories, and Subtasks (or None) to help you organize and plan your backlog. Epics are the highest level in conceptual planning and usually represent a large feature or set of features that span multiple sprints. Epics get broken down into Stories, sometimes called User Stories, which describe the feature experience from the point of view of the user. 

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Summary of the Epic, Story, Subtask and Checklist relationship in Assembla.

Stories should generally be small enough to fit into a single sprint. If they don’t, you can break them down into smaller, related Stories. This helps teams more accurately estimate and plan work and visualize dependencies. Each Story can be further broken down into Subtasks. Subtasks detail each work activity that must be completed to accomplish the Story. Typically, you want to keep Subtasks small enough that they can be completed in a day or two.

Epics can span multiple sprints, but Stories are assigned to a specific sprint and all the Subtasks associated with that story move with them. If a Story has too many Subtasks to be completed in one sprint then you should split the Subtasks across multiple Stories and create a Related relationship between them. If a Subtask has multiple items that need to be completed within a sprint, you can use the Subtask relationship to create dependent subtasks (Before, After). Within Subtasks, you can also create a Checklist. A Checklist is a to-do list that helps break down Subtasks into smaller, manageable steps.  

To get started with Assembla Tickets, watch the video or check out these resources below.

How to create Epic, Story, Subtask and Checklist relationships in Assembla.

Organizing and Visualizing Your Plan

Once you have your work identified and documented in Tickets, there are several Agile PM tools in Assembla you can use to help organize, track, and visualize those Tickets during your software development lifecycle.

Milestones

In Assembla, a sprint or iteration is represented by a Milestone. You can create Milestones to match your team’s development and release cycles and then assign Tickets to that Milestone to keep track of the items for each sprint. The Current Milestone refers to the sprint your team is currently working on. You can create Milestones in the future to plan upcoming work and assign Tickets to those future dates. For items that haven’t been evaluated yet, or that are so far in the future they haven’t been assigned a date, there is a Backlog Milestone you can use to track work not yet assigned to milestones. 

Creating a updating Milestones

The Milestones calendar view arranges the milestones you have defined on a calendar based on their due dates and color codes them to indicate which are past their due dates with open Tickets (red), passed their due dates with closed Tickets (green), or not past their due date (blue). Assembla supports passive and dynamic exporting of Milestone calendars to iCal and Google Calendar. For more information on Milestones, see Organize Tickets Using Milestones.

List Views

List Views are the easiest way to get an overview of your Tickets. In a List View your Tickets are displayed with colors that indicate importance, following status, and assigned status. You can use the columns to sort Tickets and the “Group by” option to group your Tickets by a certain field. You can also filter your Tickets using predefined Default filters, Personal filters, or Team filters. List Views enable bulk updates with the “Bulk Changes” option, letting you quickly make changes to multiple Tickets at the same time. For more information on List Views, see Understand List Views and How to Use Them.

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View Ticket List by a number of variables.

Cardwalls

A cardwall is a visual representation of your Tickets as “cards” that can be sorted into different columns. Columns can be viewed as Milestones, Status or Users. You can customize the columns to fit your team’s development process and then watch as the cards progress across the Cardwall. For more details on the Cardwall, see Using the Assembla Cardwall.

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View Cardwalls by Milestones, User and Status and filter tickets based on almost any variable.

Cumulative Flow Diagrams

You can visualize your current Milestone with the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD). The CFD report generates a graph that shows the number of Tickets in each status over time. You can use the CFD to visualize the arrival rate of new Tickets into a Milestone and the departure rate or velocity of completed Tickets. It also displays your team burnup, or the cumulative number of tickets completed in the current Milestone. You can use the CFD graph to quickly identify bottlenecks in a particular status or scope creep from too many incoming Tickets. To learn more about CFDs, see Track Milestones’ Progress with Cumulative Flow Diagram.

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Tracking Milestone progress with the Cumulative Flow Diagram.

Story Lifecycle Report

The Story Lifecycle report is a view of the Stories in a specific Milestone. You can use this report to track Story progress during a Milestone to determine which Stories are moving forward and closer to completion and which are moving backward because of incoming bugs or additional feature requests. 

You can also create a Story Lifecycle report based on Tags in order to track Stories related to the same Tag. Subtasks must be related to Story Tickets for the report to be accurate. If a Story Ticket does not have a Subtask it will not show up in the report. To learn more, see Track a Story Ticket’s Progress with Stories Lifecycle Reports.

How to view Story progress directly within Tickets.

Agile IT Project Management with Assembla

Assembla has a wide variety of flexible and customizable Agile development tools to help your team plan and track their projects. If you’re ready to try cloud-based Agile IT Project Management software, start a free 14 day trial of Assembla. Our team would love to talk with you about how Assembla can meet your Agile development needs.