Agility is what drives the IT world. Be Silicon Valley or any corner of the world, Agile is the key to success for software developers. Here we are introducing the GreenHopper 6, the latest update to the much known GreenHopper that has been serving over 650,000 users worldwide and leading the charge for teams discovering and advancing agile pursuits. The latest version comes with several enhanced features and refinements that are believed to take Agile and team performance to new heights. Let’s find out how.

While GreenHopper is already a powerful way to transform JIRA into an agile project planning tool that keeps teams speedy, GreenHopper 6 delivers killer functionality for Agile teams of all experience levels across three big areas. These include features under following heads:

One Board to Rule Them All – A standard “single view” board that gives individuals and teams quick, custom views of what needs to be done and what people are doing. It comes with a fresh UI, made zippier with zero page reloads, and permanent URLs that can be easily shared with other team members.

Agile Best Practices Built-in – One-click column creator makes it easy to create new workflow steps, all within GreenHopper, and evolve the teams’ process. New instant filtering and multi-select ranking help a team quickly groom and prune its growing backlog.

JIRA Turbocharged – JIRA is the tracking platform for projects of all shapes and sizes. This release offers management for multiple JIRA projects in a single board using JQL, the JIRA Query Language. GreenHopper 6 displays sprints in Team Calendars so the team can better plan around potential scheduling conflicts.

The GreenHopper 6 release looks really optimistic and helpful for developer teams who want to speed up their team processes without any glitches. Again, I would stress the importance of ‘Agile’ here that is the backbone of GreenHopper too. Besides software developers, government departments are also embracing this approach to leverage it for their benefit. We recently heard US and UK government accounting oversight bodies recommending the use of agile practices for government funded development projects, and have issued reports and guidelines on it. Both United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the United Kingdom National Audit Office (NAO) also released their set of guidelines for agile adoption.

More recently, in the same Agile vein, Rally Software announced the acquisition of Agile Advantage, a performance management solution that helps organizations maximize the financial return of Agile software development projects. Since the launch of the Rally Portfolio Manager, they’ve been adding functionality to the service based on customer feedback. It is built on the Agile ALM platform and delivers benefits of Agile practices to strategic roadmap and portfolio planning levels by offering: Business view of Agile development status, Development aligned with portfolio investment plans, Fact-based governance, Value-driven prioritization, and Realistic roadmaps.