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6 Exciting Tools To Help Your Team Be More Agile

At Mend.io, we understand the importance of having the right tools to support agile. That’s why we’ve assembled a selection of 6 agile tools that you should consider. They are listed below, roughly in the order in which you will need them — from initial planning, to project management, to day-to-day team communication and time tracking.

While all the tools on this list are only a few years old, several of them already have millions of users. Even if you gave one of them a look a year or two ago, it’s definitely time to revisit them because of some recent developments. Read on to find out more.

1. MindMeister

Great projects start with great ideas, and one of the best ways to generate great ideas is by using mind maps. Just ask Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Thomas Edison, all of whom were adherents of this technique.

There are dozens of online mindmapping tools, but MindMeister stands out thanks to how well rounded and polished it is. Besides creating beautiful mind maps, it allows you to easily export those mind maps into slideshows, to connect to other platforms like Google Drive or Evernote or even to an online project and task management software (MeisterTask) provided by the same company.

MindMeister

2. Aha!

Once you have your great idea, it’s time to start making it a reality. This is where Aha! comes in.

Aha! is a tool for product owners and product managers that allows them to plan out where the product is going. From feature boards to a visualization of the project roadmap, it gives product owners a high level view of the project. Aha! integrates with Jira, Pivotal, Trello, GitHub, and just about any other development tool you would like to use.

Aha!

3. Trello

Thanks to its freemium business model and its easy online setup, Trello has become the top choice for a lightweight project planning and management tool (it recently passed 10 million users).

Basically, Trello provides online Kanban boards. But with the recently announced Trello Business Class, it now offers integrations with other apps, more powerful board management, and user management and security. In other words, it’s becoming an all-around choice as a project management tool for all kinds of software teams.

Trello

4. monday.com

If Trello is lightweight, then monday.com is beautiful and intuitive. Yes, monday.com (formerly daPulse) is a project management software, and it has the requisite cards (though here they are called “pulses”) and columns of a project board, plus plenty of other neat features. monday.com has more than 200 templates so you can get started instantly.

monday.com also has an added emphasis on transparency and communication. For example, users can comment, like, and subscribe to comments on any topic, as well as tag their team members seamlessly. This allows for more recognition and accountability, and it’s one of the reasons that monday.com is the project management tool of choice for more than 100,000 teams, including at high-growth startups such as Fiverr, Uber, and Wix.

monday.com

5. Slack

You’ve probably heard plenty about Slack already — it launched three years ago and has been growing spectacularly since then. But we are including it here because the reasons to adopt Slack keep increasing.

At bottom, Slack is a team chat application. What makes it remarkable are the number of integrations, customizations, and bots that are available. In a nutshell, Slack can become a super-powerful communication hub for your entire team.

And if you are focused on agile development, then Slack’s acquisition of startup Screenhero is particularly relevant for you. It allows for easy screen sharing right within Slack — perfect for pair programming, inside your office or across distributed teams.

Slack

6. Toggl

Agile execution often comes into conflict with the realities of business demands. In other words, your clients, internal or external, demand more and more from your team, until you are forced to make a compromise on the way your team works. That’s where the value of time tracking comes in. Enter Toggl.

Toggl is a one-click time-tracking app that syncs across different devices, across multiple projects and sub-projects, and works whether you are online or offline. It also generates reports and time estimates based on previous records.

Toggl

That wraps up our list of the 6 agile tools to watch. Adopting any of these tools might require a change in the working culture of your team. But considering the benefits that come with agile when it is done right, it’s worth investigating these tools to see if they could help you improve the productivity and satisfaction of your employees.

After all, this is the reason we founded Mend.io. We wanted to offer engineering and security teams an open source management solution that fits agile processes, unlike open source code scanning tools that were developed to fit waterfall.

Meet The Author

Adam Murray

Adam Murray is a content writer at Mend. He began his career in corporate communications and PR, in London and New York, before moving to Tel Aviv. He’s spent the last ten years working with tech companies like Amdocs, Gilat Satellite Systems, Allot Communications, and Sisense. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature. When he’s not spending time with his wife and son, he’s preoccupied with his beloved football team, Tottenham Hotspur.

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