Aha! Launches Fully Extendable Agile Development Tool
Today is a big day. We are making our most significant product announcement since we founded Aha! back in August 2013. I am thrilled to announce Aha! Develop — a standalone new product for agile software development teams. You can now apply to be one of the first to use it through an early access program.
Developers have the skills and want to be able to control how they work — we think we have given them what they need to do that and more with Aha! Develop.
Aha! Develop includes all the functionality you would expect from an agile development tool — sprint planning, kanban board, collaborative workflow, and a wiki-like knowledge base. But it is unlike anything that you have used in the past. The difference is the radical customization possible with extensions that you and others can create.
Extensions are lightning-fast to make and use. Powered by modern frontend React architecture and GraphQL, you can create extensions to update the UI, add unique workflows, and much more. But like most things in life, it is more impactful to see how it works firsthand.
Aha! Develop was created by developers for developers. Our own team struggled to find a tool that balanced simplicity with flexibility. Existing tools that offered customization were too cumbersome and the simpler ones had rigid workflows. So we built one that puts you in control of the tool — not the other way around.
We know your team will be happy to have the freedom to shape your development tool to fit your workflow. You can change the user interface, workflow, and how it integrates with the other tools you use. Here are a few examples to inspire you to build your way with Aha! Develop:
Add your own importer
Customer escalations can overtake a team's backlog. You are pushed into a reactive, fire-fighting cycle — instead of building the features your customers need. One way to address this problem is to flip the flow. Instead of being inundated by support teams pushing issues into your backlog, pull escalations from support into your queue. Creating a Zendesk extension for Aha! Develop helps you do just that. Triage outstanding support tickets during your weekly planning and pull only the most important issues into your sprint.
Create an importer extension for any other tool you use, such as GitHub or Jira.
Plan the way you love to work
Estimation is critical for agile planning. Many use planning poker but every team handles the details differently. Reflect your team's methods with a custom planning poker extension. Developers can cast votes directly on the feature using a scoring system everyone agrees on. And since Aha! Develop extensions are reactive, the team can watch as the votes roll in live.
Extensions are open source, quick to customize and install, and free to use.
Streamline deployments
You want everyone to have access to the latest iteration of a feature in progress. Make it seamless when you create a deployment extension that enables anyone viewing the feature card to initiate a deployment of the associated PR. You could take this even further by automatically deploying to a review environment as soon as a feature moves to an "Acceptance testing" status — or de-provisioning the review environment when a feature is marked as complete.
Web components are available for adding common UI elements to your extensions, like the menu button.
Embed analytics
Developers have no shortage of analytics tools these days — Datadog, Sysdig, or even a self-hosted Prometheus. The question is not "Are we tracking this?" but rather "Where can I find it?" Now you can visualize this data directly from your workflow tool. For example, you can create a Datadog dashboard for each team, then embed those dashboards into Aha! Develop with an extension. Quickly flip from the workflow board to an application health dashboard custom-tailored for each team — without having to disrupt your flow by switching tools.
Here you can see the complete code for an extension to integrate a dashboard from Datadog.
We look forward to seeing how you customize Aha! Develop to make it your own.
Developers should be able to build products that customers love and be happy doing it. That is why Aha! expanded our portfolio to offer this new product. We already offer the best-known and most widely used tools for product and innovation managers today with Aha! Roadmaps and Aha! Ideas. It is time engineering teams have a new agile development tool and enjoy the ultimate control to work their own way.
Aha! Develop is a fully extendable agile development tool. Start working your way now. Build your own extensions today when you apply to join the early access program. Early access is perfect for developers in a company with at least 25 people who are collaborating with at least four other engineers. It is being limited to an exclusive group of 100 companies.
Aha! Develop does not integrate with existing Aha! Roadmaps now, but will in the near future.
