Managing Agile Development Projects with

HP PPM Center and HP Quality Center

White paper
 Executive summary
Agile frameworks are rapidly gaining popularity
among software developers in enterprises of all types
and sizes. But with the promise of faster development
and better software quality comes an even greater
challenge—supporting dozens of fast-paced projects
without losing track of the big picture—aligning IT with
business objectives to increase business outcomes.
With multiple development projects—both Agile and
waterfall—underway or under consideration at any
given time, how do you keep your IT team from getting capture all the details about all current work so every
overcommitted, over budget and overwhelmed?
Step one is to gain complete visibility into all your
operational and strategic activities, and determine
which ones will deliver the best business results.
Whether your organization is predominantly Agile
or is working in a hybrid mode of both Agile and
traditional lifecycle methods, IT management needs
to implement effective and flexible controls across the
entire organization. Understanding project milestones, management, release planning and quality
deliverables, resource and budget requirements
and keeping track of the project health and quality
indicators allow IT management to bring order
to chaos. Without such controls and visibility, it is
impossible to reduce project schedule and budget
overruns, reduce the risks and achieve true
business agility.
This paper discusses how HP Project and Portfolio
Management (PPM) Center and HP Quality Center
(QC) software can give you the information you need
to make better business decisions, lower the cost of
running both your Agile and traditional development
projects, increase collaboration between business and
IT and improve application quality. We will highlight
the core elements of Agile development methodologies a team effort, and HP PPM Center and HP Quality
and explore how Agile development can be aligned
with the basic principles of project and portfolio
management to make sure that IT objectives meet the
company’s business goals.
The HP Solution for Managing
Agile Projects
HP Software provides an integrated platform for
planning, staffing and monitoring Agile development
projects, as well as managing application quality.
HP PPM Center offers a consolidated view of all IT
activities so that management has better visibility into
the portfolio, more effective controls, greater flexibility project teams will object to adopting.
in applying automated processes, and better-defined
quality standards. With the HP solution, your project
and portfolio management system can give your
organization visibility into everything that is being
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worked on—including project health data, non-project
work, resource allocations, and cost information.
This integrated solution gives you the unique ability
to aggregate both Agile and waterfall projects and
see the critical interdependencies among projects—
for example whether the resource demands of an
operational project or other activity might prevent you
from undertaking a proposed project. This capability
enables you to manage and prioritize the collected
work so you can ensure that the right people are
working on the right tasks at the right time. You can
decision is supported by hard data.
Once an Agile project is underway, the high-level
key project information is passed to HP Quality
Center which can help break down the Product
Vision and Epic-level requirements into more
specific deliverables—the User Stories. HP Quality
Center—which is tightly integrated with HP PPM
Center—combines the elements of requirements
management into one scalable, Web-based solution
that is ideally suited to manage the process of
creating, organizing, and prioritizing the User Stories.
HP Quality Center helps capture User Stories and
stores them in a centralized global repository that is
accessible to all team members. Any changes to the
User Stories are immediately known to the entire team,
making iteration planning easier and more accurate.
HP Quality Center then helps trace the User Stories
throughout the testing process to make sure that teams
are focusing their effort on the right areas and are
fixing the defects that affect the most critical
business functionality.
Software engineering with Agile methodology is
Center are specifically designed for collaborative
engineering across the development cycle—planning,
design, testing, editing, change management, and
ongoing maintenance. They are closely integrated to
allow data to flow seamlessly between stages and to
enable control points and reporting at any point in the
lifecycle. Together, these solutions are exceptionally
capable of supporting both Agile and traditional IT
projects. They enable you to align business goals with
technical resources, help you enhance the business
outcomes of IT projects, and are comprehensive and
flexible enough to deliver true business agility without
the added weight of rigid, bureaucratic processes
Figure 1: Agile methods focus on delivering working software features with acceptable quality in short iterations, each containing steps for
project planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, testing, and documentation
Scrum Master
Product Owner
The Team
Sprint
1
2 Sprint Planning Meeting
3
4 Potentially
5
No Changes
6
7
8
9
10
(in Duration or Deliverable)
11
12
13
Product Backlog
Diagram Source: GoodAgile—Introduction to Scrum for Managers and Executives
Main Principles of Agile Development
There is no single Agile method, but rather a set of
at least 14 broadly recognized methods centered
around a number of common principles: rapid release
cycles, value-driven development, team collaboration,
continuous planning and improvement, and customer
involvement. Instead of extensive upfront investment
and planning, Agile methods focus on delivering
working software features with acceptable quality in
short “time-boxes”—or iterations—that typically last
one to six weeks. Each iteration includes all of the
tasks necessary to release the mini-increment of new
functionality—planning, requirements analysis, design,
coding, testing, and documentation. At the end of
each iteration, the team re-evaluates project priorities.
Agile methods emphasize real-time communication
and empower people to collaborate and make
decisions together quickly and effectively. Most Agile
teams are cross-functional and include all the people
necessary to build the software. All Agile methods
value continuous evolution of both the project and the
software, are lightweight and inherently adaptable.
Scrum: Overview, Basic Concepts
and Jargon
For the purpose of this paper, we will use the
example, concepts and jargon of a single, and
perhaps the most popular Agile development
method—Scrum. Scrum is a simple but powerful
framework for development teams and customers to
continuously monitor project progress and quality
and use the feedback to surface problems, adapt
the processes and adjust the project scope. Scrum is
deeply rooted in collaboration and provides
Daily Scrum
Meeting
Sprint Review
Shippable
Product
Sprint Retrospective
a high degree of clarity and transparency for all
stakeholders—the development team, customers,
product owners, management and others.
Despite its “rebellious” nature, the basic phases of a
Scrum development process are not that dissimilar
from those used in any other type of project. Project
managers, product managers and project sponsors
plan, define and initiate the development project, the
development team executes the plan, and together they
monitor and control the results. However, traditional
development methods define a single sequence of
initiation, investigation, design, coding, and testing
for each project, while Agile development projects
rely on multiple fixed-length iterations, each including
planning, development, and assessment phases.
In the Scrum development method, the Product Owner
owns the Vision—a high-level strategic idea for the
product, its intended uses and the value that it would
provide for a specific customer base. The Vision
contains input from customers, end-users, executives,
sales, support, and other external and internal
stakeholders. The Product Owner organizes the Vision
into a single list of project proposals that needs to be
evaluated and prioritized based on the business value
and risk. This prioritized list of requested features and
functionality is referred to as the Product Backlog.
The next step is to break down the large ambiguous
features—or Epics—into smaller, well-defined
User Stories that can be easily consumed by the
development teams in the next iteration, or Sprint.
Sprint is a fixed period of development time which
typically takes between one and four weeks. Before
each Sprint, the team selects which User Stories from
the Product Backlog it will commit to, and creates a
Task-level plan for how they will deliver the results. For
each Task, the team estimates the required time
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 commitment and compares it with the total available
development hours to make sure that they do not
over-commit for this Sprint. The commitment level
and the due dates do not change during the Sprint.
The team meets daily to discuss Sprint progress,
list tasks that have been completed and need to
be accomplished in the next day, and report any
roadblocks. The ScrumMaster keeps track of these
meetings and monitors the daily progress.
The team also updates several simple charts:
• The Sprint Backlog lists all current tasks and the
hours remaining for completing each one
• The Burndown Chart totals the number of hours
remaining for all tasks
• The Task Board shows all tasks that are in-progress.
The goal for each Sprint is to deliver all the
functionality the team has promised to deliver and
to produce a complete piece of product functionality
that has been designed, developed, and tested with
acceptable level of quality. At the end of each Sprint,
the Product Owner, ScrumMaster and the team review
the finished product, discuss the development process,
and incorporate the feedback into the Product
Backlog and future Sprints.
Strategic Planning for Your Agile
Projects with HP PPM Center software
Agile frameworks emerged as an alternative to
extensive project planning. However, before any
new Agile project can begin, or even be considered,
IT management needs to gain a complete view of
everything that is going on in IT—proposed projects,
application changes, strategic initiatives, services
provided and all relevant operational activities—in
order to make realistic resource and time commitments
and to select the projects that best align with the
company’s business objectives. You also need to
continuously monitor project health to respond to
fast-changing portfolio needs quickly.
Unlike approaches that offer only time-reporting
systems and project scheduling tools, HP PPM
Center offers top-down planning capabilities that
are tightly coupled with bottom-up details of the
project execution. HP PPM Center integrates project
and portfolio management, program management
and other key functions with all relevant operational
activities, to enable that you have up-to-the minute
visibility into your total IT workload.
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To help make strategic decisions on which Agile
projects will be given the green light, HP PPM Center
gives you the portfolio or investment planning tools
to analyze the trade-offs among various investment
alternatives. This creates virtually unlimited scenario-
based planning capabilities and gives you the ability to
forecast the financial and technical impacts of changes.
With HP PPM Center you can clearly see what
resources and capabilities are available at any given
time for your fast-paced Agile development projects.
Building a Product Vision: Initiating a
Project Proposal
To initiate an Agile project, the Product/Application
Owner creates the high-level Project Vision and
submits it as a project proposal within HP PPM Center.
Based on the project details and supporting business
case that are included in the proposal, the Portfolio
Manager can begin the process of evaluating it against
other initiatives—proposed or in-flight—and make a
decisions on whether the project will be funded.
HP PPM Center lets business and IT stakeholders
collaboratively govern the entire IT portfolio with
multiple levels of input, review, and approval. From
proposal initiation, justification and review to project
initiation, execution, deployment and benefits
realization, HP PPM Center uses automatic, real-time
updates and a clear and flexible process to keep all
stakeholders involved.
To streamline the process of submitting the project
proposal, the Product/Application Owner can
leverage the powerful and flexible workflow engine
within HP PPM Center. HP PPM Center facilitates the
process of gathering input from all stakeholders,
routes the proposal through required approval stages
and consolidates all supporting materials in a central
location, transforming the high-level Product Vision
into a detailed project proposal.
Creating a Product Roadmap:
Managing Agile IT Projects
Once the proposal is approved, it becomes an IT
project. At this stage, a high-level Product Vision is
broken down into several Epics—specific definitions
of the product’s features and functionality that span
multiple releases.
An Epic is a big enough slice of product functionality
to have its own plan, resource estimates, and
milestones. The Product/Application Owner can
initiate an IT project for each Epic, in order to plan
and track its phases, deliverables, and tasks. And just
as multiple Epics stem from a single vision, multiple
Figure 2: HP PPM Center acts as the central point of control for managing and continuously assessing the health of the project
IT projects can be linked to the same proposal, which
contains all the supporting information, background,
and value propositions.
The HP PPM Center Project Management module
provides a Web-based platform for project
collaboration among team members and stakeholders
with real-time visibility into resources, processes,
status and inter-project dependencies. Agile Product/
Application Owners and team members can plan and
schedule Sprints, create preliminary staffing plans and
track project status, health and deliverables through
the HP PPM Center Project Management dashboards.
Throughout the duration of the project, the Project
Management module can act as the central location
for managing and continuously assessing the health of
the project. HP PPM Center also offers bi-directional
integration with Microsoft Project.
Managing User Stories with HP
Quality Center
One of the most important concepts in all Agile
development methodologies is the notion of
value-driven User Stories. Rather than trying to find a
product idea that will satisfy many kinds of different
customers, Agile Product/Application Owners attempt
to connect each product feature with its intended user
and focus on the value that it provides for this user.
A User Story could be a product requirement, an
internal deliverable, or any other type of a container
for related tasks. All User Stories must be small
enough to be completed within a single Sprint.
The integrated solution from HP allows for User Stories
to be derived directly from the Product Vision and
Epic details that were captured during the planning
phase of the Agile project.
HP Quality Center is a collaborative, Web-based
solution that can help Agile teams organize and
manage the User Stories in a central repository. The
HP Quality Center Requirements Management module
contains customizable hierarchical fields for capturing
the User Story and its attributes: name, description, fit
criteria, owner, estimated efforts and all related tasks.
All User Stories are typically stored in order of priority
and referred to as Product Backlog. To plan the next
Sprint, the development team selects the top User
Stories from the Product Backlog and adds them to the
next cycle. HP Quality Center supports the concepts
of release and cycle management as integrated parts
of the Application Quality Management process.
With HP Quality Center, you can see not only
detailed descriptions of each Sprint, but also complete
statistics on the User Stories that are included in this
Sprint, test plans associated with it, and detailed
quality information.
In most Agile methods, User Stories are further broken
down into Tasks—the actionable work items that get
assigned to individual team members. HP Quality
Center allows for tracking and managing of Tasks
as part of its Requirements Management module.
Tasks are defined as a requirement type, and the
process of creating, refining and completing the Tasks
is governed by the customizable workflow within
HP Quality Center. For example, when the Task is
first added, it is assigned a “draft” status. After the
definition has been completed and the ScrumMaster
has added the effort estimate, the Task status changes
to “defined”. As soon as the Task is assigned an
owner, its status changes to “in progress”, and
finally when the Task is finished, its status is set to
“completed”.
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Figure 3: Through tight integration between HP PPM Center and HP Quality Center, key Agile project information is accessible to all team
members, allowing for greater visibility and control at every stage of the development process

Create Evaluate Approve Proposal

Create Project Define Project WBS
Proposal Proposal funding

Break Epic-level HP Quality Center

Summary resource
requirements Epic-level assignment at
into User Stories requirements Sprint level
and Tasks

HP PPM Center

Manage the
Backlog of User
Stories and Tasks

Assign User
Total Story points
Stories and
added in QC
Tasks to Sprints

Execute and Burndown

update Tasks Charts and
during Sprints other reporting

Each User Story typically includes the high-level
preliminary estimate of engineering hours required
to complete it. After the Sprint has started, these
numbers can be refined based on the more accurate,
Task-level estimates. All time estimates in HP Quality
Center can be aggregated to the Sprint or release
level, enabling the Agile development teams to make
more accurate commitments for each cycle.
The same aggregated view can be used by the
ScrumMaster to monitor the progress of Sprints and
releases. Integrated, customizable graphs and reports
in HP Quality Center allow the Agile teams to quickly
view the essential graphs, such as the Backlog and
the Burndown charts.
Managing quality in Agile projects
with HP Quality Center
HP Quality Center provides a Web-based, integrated
system for automated software quality testing and
management across a wide range of application
environments. It provides the visibility needed to
validate both functionality and automated business
processes—and identifies bottlenecks in production
that hamper business outcomes.
HP Quality Center enables Agile teams to engage
in application testing even before the development
process is complete, thereby providing the ability
to accelerate release schedules while maintaining a
high-level of quality. HP Quality Center is an effective
tool for Agile QA because it is specifically designed
to facilitate the type of collaboration and cross-
pollination that is key to Agile software engineering.
To learn more about HP Quality Center and its
support for Agile quality methods, visit
www.hp.com/go/quality.
Building a Quality Center of
Excellence
The idea of establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE)
for managing the quality of Agile applications may
first sound illogical to an organization focused on
quick and nimble development. The truth however
is that managing quality as a shared service can
actually help you achieve better business results
faster and with less process overhead. HP Center
Management for Quality Center is built on HP PPM
and Quality Center software and provides
pre-packaged content and workflows to automate key
processes for quality management and enables best
practices for project collaboration as well as project
and resource management.
HP Center Management for Quality Center provides
a single dashboard view for application owners to
create, manage and track both Agile and traditional
development projects. This view improves the project
delivery process and helps you properly assign
resources to tasks and manage them efficiently based
on the business criticality of each project.
HP Center Management for Quality Center also helps
enforce best practices by enabling the shared CoE to
define a QA project template that can be reused by
different Agile projects.
With a Quality Center CoE, you can simultaneously
track the quality of multiple Agile projects, gain
real-time visibility into requirements, tests and defects,
aggregate results and reporting across multiple HP
Quality Center instances and projects and improve
your organization’s quality practices.

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Figure 4: HP Quality Center allows for tracking and managing of Agile project Tasks as part of its Requirements Management module

Multi-Backlog
handling for
enabling
Scrum-of-Scrum

First Level contains

Backlogs and
Cycles
All items are
assigned to a
specific target
Release and Cycle

Aggregated Effort per

level for Estimates, Actuals
and Remaining and
Percentage Completed

Summary Together, HP PPM Center and HP Quality Center help

you focus on optimizing business outcomes rather
There is no question that Agile methodologies are
than just running individual Agile projects. Using the
here to stay. They are gaining traction in large
integrated HP solution, companies can achieve the
enterprise development organizations and are being
true alignment between business and IT that leads to
successfully used to build mission-critical financial,
a transformation in business results.
healthcare, and government software systems.
Sources:
But it would be a mistake to assume that implementing
Agile techniques removes the need for enterprise • Focus on Value: How to create value-driven user
portfolio management, demand, resource and budget stories by Chris Sterling
http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/89-focus-on-
planning and project management. On the contrary,
value
with so many Agile development projects being
proposed and already underway in any organization, • Glossary of Scrum Terms by Victor Szalvay
IT management needs even greater visibility into http://www.scrumalliance.org/articles/39-glossary-
all IT projects, a way to manage and prioritize of-scrum-terms
IT investments, flexible controls over the release • GoodAgile Introduction to Scrum for Managers and
processes and solid compliance objectives. Executives www.goodagile.com
The strength of HP PPM Center is in enabling
collaborative decision making that complements the
basic Agile principle of “individuals and interactions
over processes and tools”. It works especially well across
geographies, with Web-based collaboration and the
free flow of information among project stakeholders
and different teams. This helps support the offshore
outsourcing models for IT development projects.

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© Copyright 2009–2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein
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contained herein.
4AA2-4193ENW Rev. 2, January 2010