Say Hello to Agile Hive 3!

Agile Hive 3 is here!
PI planning is one of the Scaled Agile Framework's focal points, and it mainly supports the teams and the Agile Release Trains (ART) in cross-team planning and collaboration. This also includes capacity and sprint planning, identifying dependencies and risks, and defining team goals (Team PI Objectives, and their summary as ART PI Objectives). Of course, this includes a transparent preparation process for all teams involved, product managers, business owners, process owners, and other stakeholders.

For the new release of Agile Hive, our teams put a lot of work into the best possible PI planning implementation to improve the planning functions again. As a result, the Jira-App Easy Agile Programs are no longer necessary. This reduces costs significantly and makes Agile Hive even easier to set up and administer and more intuitive in its daily use by the teams. With the newly implemented migration wizard, programs from Easy Agile Programs can be easily migrated to Agile Hive 3.

Here are three highlights from Agile Hive 3:

1. Digital Team Breakout Boards

Usually, PI planning takes place in the physical presence of all stakeholders and all ART teams. During the Team Breakout Sessions, teams planned their sprints using sticky notes on physical boards. With Agile Hive 3.0 and the new Team Breakout Boards, teams can now easily and completely plan their sprints digitally.

This includes things like:

Per sprint capacity planning
Representation of features and all ART processes as swimlanes
Display of the associated stories and all team processes
Visual representation of team-internal and cross-team dependencies
Filtering of dependencies
Display of critical dependencies per team
Easily switch between current, past, and future Program Increments

2. Digital Program Boards

Another important step in the team breakouts process is to maintain the Program Board. The Program Board helps to identify when features are completed and what critical dependencies exist. Agile Hive 3 completely relieves you of this previously tedious manual work. Both the Program Boards and the Breakout Boards can be accessed via new buttons directly within the Reports view of Agile Hive. Simply switch back and forth between the views you need without changing the context.

3. Program Increments

A Program Increment (PI) is a time-based planning interval for Agile Release Trains (approximately eight to twelve weeks long) and is used to plan, create and ultimately deliver value in the form of functioning, tested software.

With Agile Hive 3, you can now conveniently create PIs for your ARTs from within the Agile Hive views. Especially handy is that the included sprints are created directly for all member teams and that these sprints can also have flexible, customizable sprint lengths.

Also, the PI information is provided as a field and can be viewed and modified in every operation.

Looking forward: Where to now?

Our goal is to release a new version of Agile Hive in the Atlassian Marketplace after our dev team's conclusion each sprint. The next version will be focused on improvements to the Breakout Board:

Drag'n'Drop Swimlanes: View top 10 features and insert them as swimlanes via drag & drop
Feature Breakdown: Create stories and other team operations directly in the breakout within the feature swimlanes

Be sure to take a look at which features will be coming up next in the Agile-Hive-Roadmap.

SAFe® with Atlassian tools: Get to know Agile Hive now!

Would you like to know more about Agile Hive and the software-supported implementation of SAFe®? We would be happy to discuss your requirements for enterprise-wide agile product development and product management with you. Take a look at our Implementation Project documentation to see an overview of what an implementation would entail.

Get in touch with us today and let us demonstrate how it works in a personal session.