Leading Project Management Tools for a Streamlined Software Development Process

2 Nov, 2021

4 min read

Nothing significant in the technical world can come to fruition without an institutionalized process. It takes time to build and optimize a process with perhaps a multitude of trials and errors that eventually results in understanding what works best. This approach applies accurately to the software development process that often must evolve if it is to become a pillar of your company’s success.

A major part of your process will almost certainly be the tools you select for managing the entire software development cycle. To say that choosing the right project management tools will enable a successful process is by no means an understatement.

In this post, we will review the tools deemed best for managing digital product development. The goal here is to discern a few important tools that can enhance your overall development cycle and increase your team’s productivity. But before listing these tools, let’s explore what product management tools are and why they are essential for your software development process.

What Are Product Management Tools?

These are desktop programs or mobile applications that your development team uses to carry out various stages of their project, including analysis, planning, programming, monitoring, and all other activities related to the development lifecycle.

These tools are accessible to all the individuals who are part of your team, working in collaboration. This helps to ensure that everyone is aware of what tasks are lined up and in what direction the process is flowing. The project plan and scope of work you share through these tools provide a roadmap, guiding members with their role and progress in the project. The management and monitoring of activities become seamless by incorporating the right tools, resulting in a faster and efficient product release with minimal to no errors.

Furthermore, their usage becomes indispensable if the team is located in different geographical positions or operating remotely.

Why are Management Tools essential in Software Development?

Project management tools offer a direction and breakdown of the entire project into different phases. This way, a hierarchy is established, and everyone becomes aware of what is on priority, which tasks need execution first, and how they are dependent on each other.

With that, project management becomes easy for the team lead and project manager, saving time and mitigating risks.

There are several project management tools available in the market. We will list down those currently used by software development companies.

List of Best Tools

Jira

Jira is a widely used project management platform in the agile development environment. Unlike traditional software development lifecycles, agile is highly flexible for adopting changes during digital product development. And that entry for making changes as you progress is inconspicuously placed as an ‘issue.’

Moreover, via this platform, users can create backlogs, plan sprints, make stories, track bugs, manage workflow, and deploy the software effectively.

As Jira comes from the famous group known as Atlassian, integrating it with various other tools becomes pretty straightforward, enabling end-to-end project management. Apart from this, team members utilize this platform to organize, monitor and deploy a piece of software as per requirement.

Trello

Trello is a solution for your product management cycle that relies on the Kanban board approach. You can integrate it with scrum or agile methodologies smoothly. It allows you to combine or group a set of activities on one board. After that, according to the progress, you move ‘cards’ to reflect what work is done and what needs to be done.

Gitlab

This is a product management tool to manage software development from the building stage to deployment. Gitlab brings everything under one umbrella. Individuals using this avail support in the product lifecycle and achieve efficiency by shrinking days of work into hours, and hours into minutes. You cannot miss Gitlab if you aim to maximize productivity, decrease development costs, and reduce time to market.

Slack

This well-known application is available for mobile and desktop devices for team collaboration and communication. Anyone can send messages directly to other teammates or create a channel for group discussions. In its latest version, Slack has also introduced the ‘huddle’ feature to enable audio conversation in the workspace. According to your company’s culture and policy, Slack provides you the flexibility to create either public or private channels for real-time communication.

Clockify

The purpose of incorporating Clockify in your project is to focus on managing time for activities. For example, a team lead can distribute a set of actions to a team and set a timer for each activity. Besides this, managing hourly rates and billable tasks are also possible with Clockify.

In addition, its integration with Jira makes the process more convenient. You can easily start the clock from the Jira, and it will create the entry in Clockify.

Bitbucket

Professional development teams use repository management to update their code, and Bitbucket is the perfect match for them. It is a central hub for collaborating and managing Git repositories to see the code flow. Some of its core features include governing access control to the source code, collaboration with in-line commenting, workflow control, Jira integration, Rest API control, and much more.

Instabug

Instabug is a bug tracking tool widely used by app developers to collect audience feedback and fix issues in a product. If your app fuses with Instabug, there will be a menu for reporting bugs and issues. Besides this, users can ask questions, and they can also make suggestions for developers to make improvements.

When a user sends an issue to Instabug, technical information may also be attached for the developer’s convenience to fix problems quickly. As a result, development companies often choose Instabug to enable a high-quality experience.

Google Workspace

Google always offers simplicity to transform difficult things for their user base. Therefore, it is always the finest choice for every organization and even for individual developers, bringing everything together in one central place.

A typical Google Workspace includes Sheets, Docs, Slides, Gmail, Meet, Calendar, Forms, Sites, Chat, Hangout, and more.

Zapier

To boost productivity and automate flow, Zapier, a web-based service, comes in handy. This effective service helps with accomplishing goals effectively by automating business tasks. With Zapier, you can feel the power and speed in your entire process.

Toggl

Regardless of your workflows in your organization, Toggl allows tracking of all sorts of tasks in real-time. Along with internal teamwork management, the Toggl platform specializes in working with clients, providing demonstrations, and presenting reports on the time taken by specific activities.

Bottom Line

We have only scratched the surface as far as the number of tools we have discussed above, although these are among the most popular ones. There are several others available in the management pool, and you need to dive in and explore which ones would best suit your development life cycle.

An experienced app development company can guide you with making these decisions when you have a project to develop, and you can also have custom tools developed based on your business needs.