Page title:Introduction

Closed Captioning text:Teams that follow agile development methods typically divide their release schedule into a series of fixed-length development periods called iterations. You can use Rational Team Concert to define your team's development iterations and create and update project plans to manage your team's work.

Page text: Agile Development is a form of iterative development that takes advantage of the use of small teams to create products that deliver business value early and often during the project lifecycle.


Page title:Timelines and iterations

Closed Captioning text:A timeline represents an area of activity within a project that typically has its own schedule, deliverables, teams, and process. Project intervals or phases are defined within a timeline and expressed as a hierarchy of iterations that can define start and end dates.

Page text:A project with both new product release development and current product maintenance might define these two efforts in separate development lines because they have different delivery schedules, teams, and processes.


Page title:Agile planning

Closed Captioning text: You can use Rational Team Concert to create different types of plans. In Scrum terminology, a project release plan is called Product Backlog plan, a team release plan is called Team Backlog plan, and an Iteration plan is called Sprint Backlog plan. A Project Release plan or a Product Backlog plan displays top-level work items such as Stories and Epics of a project area or team area and all child team areas. You can also view top-level work items of parent as well as all its child iterations. A Team Release plan or a Team Backlog plan that is associated with an iteration displays all the work items of that iteration and all the top-level work items of its child iterations. A Schedule Risk Assessment plan colorizes those work items whose probability is calculated less than 1.0, which means they are less probable to be completed in the current iteration. You can change estimates and run schedule risk. An Iteration plan or a Sprint Backlog plan displays the work items planned to be achieved in current iteration. Irrespective of the plan type, you can view work items in different plan modes. These are predefined plan modes for Iteration plan. Each plan type has its own predefined plan modes. A plan mode is a cohesive unit representing different elements of the Content, View Layout, and Colorize tabs You can create new plan modes, add new columns, and colorize work items based on expressions. You can use the Planned Items page of a plan to view and manage work items and team loads for the iteration. The charts show the progress made in an iteration. You can add pages to the plan for other documentation.

Page text:To be effective, iteration plans need to be accessible to everyone on the team and they need to change dynamically over the course of the iteration to reflect the team's position and direction.


Page title:Work item management

Closed Captioning text:Plans are associated either with a project area or a team area. Because categories are also associated with a project area or a team area, Rational Team Concert displays work items in the responsible team's plan based on the work item's category and the planned iteration settings.

Page text:Before beginning work on an iteration plan, define the iterations, team areas, and work item categories for your project.


Page title:Summary

Closed Captioning text:Planning is an important component of agile development. You can use Rational Team Concert to define your timelines and iterations and create different plans to help you manage your team’s work.

Page text:Each iteration produced during agile development is complete and stable: it contains not only working code and functionality, but usable documentation and a working user interface.