ThoughtWorks have enhanced their application lifecycle management product Mingle with a new dependency management capability which supports scaling development across multiple teams and tracking dependencies in the tool.
According to Mingle Product Manager Kunal Shah
We've talked with program managers, even developers, who are juggling multiple Excel spreadsheets trying to track their dependencies. It's just very unwieldy, What we've done with Mingle is create one board that tracks all the dependencies in a program that's visible to everyone. We’ve now given teams the ability to raise and resolve dependencies, so that they can solve more problems on their own. Managers only have to step in when really needed.
As more organisations scale their agile adoptions to more teams and larger products needing more coordination between multiple streams of work, dependency management has become one of the important capabilities needed for ALM tools. Both VersionOne and CA/Rally offer dependency tracking in their products, and by bringing this capability into Mingle, ThoughtWorks have an offering which customers can compare against other products in the market.
According to the press release, capabilities included in the Mingle dependency management enhancements include:
- Team members can raise, accept and resolve cross team dependencies through peer to peer dialogue within Mingle
- Clear visualizations of dependency status and progress inside the daily workspace with simple, color coded indicators
- End to end visibility for Managers of all the dependencies in the program.
- Filtering and sorting of program wide dependencies based on different criteria to facilitate planning.
The screenshot shows adding a dependency to an existing work item,
