Requirements Management

How does Mendix support defining requirements and planning?

Development teams need to deliver applications that achieve business objectives from day one while matching and even exceeding users’ needs and expectations. At the same time, the apps must stay current with changes in objectives, requirements, and expectations throughout their lifetime. Therefore, the team needs a thorough understanding of business objectives and user needs.

Assumptions must be validated, feedback must be collected, and misunderstandings must be set straight between the development team, business stakeholders, and key users. This means that the extended team needs an integrated environment where requirements, releases, feedback, and communication are coordinated, and continuous interaction is facilitated.

The Mendix Portal provides the extended team with a central space for managing app requirements in a backlog of user stories. The development team, business stakeholders, and key users can all access this space, which provides everyone involved with a single integrated view of all the requirements and a space for collaborating and implementing details. The team can comment on user stories and feedback items so that questions can be answered quickly and details specified further.

Requirements management is an integral part of application development. Mendix helps shorten the feedback loop between development teams, users, and all other stakeholders to drive project success, lower costs, and decrease time to market.

Mendix offers Epics, a user-friendly agile planning tool where teams can define their epics and user stories and plan their work using Scrum or Kanban methodology. Epics helps development teams collaborate and stay on top of their work, but it’s also easy enough for business users to collaborate with the dev team in a true fusion team fashion.

With Epics, teams can write, prioritize, and refine their stories, assign them to team members, and streamline communication with @mentioning functionality. Story statuses are fully customizable, so teams can organize their process in any way they want.

Epics is also fully integrated with the other tools Mendix offers. Developers can commit stories from Studio Pro and link any commit to the relevant user story in Epics. This helps teams keep track of the features they deliver since the full overview of commits with the links to the right user stories can be found on the Team Server page in the Mendix Portal.

Epics is also integrated with App Insights, the Mendix tool for managing user feedback. With one click, product owners can turn any feedback item into a user story. The original feedback item will contain a link to the newly created story and vice versa. For optimal traceability, the story title will also always contain the unique ID of the feedback item.

Portfolio Management is a tool for defining, prioritizing, and tracking the progress of all initiatives. Business and IT can work together to define high-level requirements.

From there, it is also possible to link epics from one or even multiple apps to a Portfolio initiative. Then, anyone interested in an initiative’s progress can see it at a glance since it is displayed as the number of completed user stories over the total number of stories left.

To sum up, Mendix supports the planning process with Epics, a tool that helps teams follow agile best practices. Epics offers rich integrations with the rest of the platform ensuring Agile planning is embedded in the software development lifecycle end-to-end and is included in all Mendix licenses.

Can changes made in development be traced back to requirements and audited?

Any user story from an active board can be linked to a commit directly in Studio Pro. This enables development teams to go back and check for commits when they need to know when or why a change was made.

Alternatively, developers can review all changes associated with a single user story by checking the Revisions section of that story. If they know which exact story they need to look into, this makes it easy to zoom in, plus it makes reviewing a story easier since it is immediately visible what has been done.

Does Mendix support integration with third-party Agile planning tools?

Yes, if you are already using an agile planning tool such as Jira, Mendix offers an out-of-the-box integration. The Scrum master of any project can set up the connection with a Jira board of their choice, which enables the same integrations as Epics when it comes to linking commits to user stories and creating stories out of feedback items.

If a Jira board is connected to a Mendix project, the link to that board will also be shown in the project-level navigation.

Importantly, the choice between Epics or Jira is set up on the project level, so it is possible to use Epics for some projects and Jira for others. You are in complete control of your planning tools.

When development activities extend to a large number of teams, some organizations require more advanced project management tools and services in addition to Mendix requirements management. For this scenario, Mendix provides APIs for integration with third-party tools and services.