Taiga Blog

In our continuous quest to engage more organizations and product managers towards greater efficiency and productivity - we have created this list of Agile related jargon that you may face during your mundane activities. If you are new to Agile, or still thinking about moving to Agile methodology, this is your resource to get all the terms right.

Lean is a buzzword these days. Every organization wants to be lean, to be able to do more and better things, with fewer resources. They also want to be agile - in a sense of quicker turnaround time and faster solutions, the key attribute of Agile methodology.

In one of our previous blog posts, we took a close look at how Agile is widely used across industries, contrary to the popular belief that agile is only for software related activities. In that study we also found some pain points- one of them was difficulty to get started. Lets face it, Agile methodology is great at helping you churn out products at faster rate, but it comes with its own set of jargon which sometimes proves very difficult for newcomers to handle. In this post today we will focus on few such terms, specifically- user story and the user story points. We will see how can these be used to simplify projects, and of course how to set them up in Taiga.

There has been a lot of talk about Kanban recently. Many software development organizations have picked up Kanban based approach to speed up their growth. There are several great Kanban specific tools available for personal and professional use, e.g. Trello, Taiga, and even Visual Studio by Microsoft. So, what makes Kanban such a great way to manage software development - and why should you give it a thought.

Ever since its inception in 2001, the Agile manifesto and the Agile project management methodology has been primarily thought of, as a tool for software companies to drive productivity. But what about non-IT, non software companies? Don’t they deserve to be productive and gain efficiency using the best practices available?

Taiga users are using the support forums to raise interesting questions and debate about the use of the tool and whether their philosophy and the objectives of the tool coincide. Here’s an example about sprint progress:

Often, there are crunch situations in a project that need developers to stretch beyond their normal timelines. There is nothing new about it, even developers are mentally prepared for such occurrences. But, such instances, many times bring out the worst in people and can be a threat to team harmony.

Everyone has few turn offs - for some it is untidy hair, for some it is unpunctuality, for some dishonesty, and so on. But almost every developer I know has one common turn off, their project management tool! Let me elaborate, being a software developer is no less than being in a very demanding relationship. You say why? A project demands a lot - attention, focus, love, dedication - just like your beloved. And developers give it all without a thought to their project, but then updating the project management portal at the end of the day - isn’t it like informing your partner’s father about what happened the whole day.

It has become a tradition for us, to attend FOSDEM (Free & Open Source Developers' European Meeting) every year since Taiga's parent organisation, Kaleidos, was born in 2011. Why? Because it is re-energising and addictive.

Have you ever dozed off on a plane and then woken up in a cold sweat, having dreamt that the pilots had bailed and no one was at the controls?