SpiraPlan lets you easily manage your requirements and user stories in an integrated requirements matrix. These requirements can be validated with the end customer and then elaborated into more detailed tasks that can be used as the basis for development.

SpiraPlan provides the ability to manage the list of releases / versions of the software being developed. Each of the releases can be broken down into smaller units of work called Iterations or Sprints. SpiraPlan includes integrated resource estimation capabilities so that you can plan out the team size needed for each iteration.

Once you have defined the project backlog of requested features (requirements), SpiraPlan lets you plan the work to be accomplished in each Iteration/Sprint. You can include requirements, tasks and defects - allowing you to determine the schedule impact of addressing critical issues as well as pre-planned features.

One the project is underway, the combined business and technical team work together to develop the sprint plan for the iterations, breaking up the features into discrete tasks and assigning the tasks to the individual team members. During development as the team work to complete the various tasks and stories, the system will track changes in the actual effort to determine if the plan needs to be rebalanced to ensure on-time, on-budget delivery.

SpiraPlan lets you schedule the team members and load balance the task resourcing allocations. As team members work on their assigned tasks they can update their progress in terms of actual and remaining effort. This provides project managers with real-time visibility on the progress of the iteration and early indications of schedule overrun.

Looking for a better way to track bugs and issues? SpiraPlan offers a complete bug tracking solution that is fully integrated with your planning system. Bug tracking features include support for customizable workflows and fields, flexible reporting, configurable email notifications, and fully editable statuses, priorities, severities and bug types.

Wish you could see the health of your project on one page? Each project has a dashboard home-page that summarizes all of the information regarding the project into a comprehensive, easily digestible form that provides a “one-stop-shop” for people interested in understanding the overall status of the project at a glance. It contains summary-level information for all types of artifact (requirements, test cases, incidents, etc.) that you can use to drill-down into the appropriate section of the application.

SpiraPlan includes an integrated web-based document management system that allows project members to upload documents in a secure, centralized location, with support for folder organization, documentation taxonomies and meta-tagging as well as built-in version control. Unlike a standalone tool, these documents can then be connected to SpiraPlan artifacts (requirements, tasks, incidents) to provide the complete picture to users.

SpiraPlan includes support for integrating Software Configuration Management (SCM) tools with the system so that you can browse the source repositories within SpiraPlan. In addition you can link commits/check-ins in the SCM tool to artifacts in SpiraPlan to provide code-level traceability of changes. This functionality will allow the system to track the code changes that are associated with Requirements (stories) that have been implemented, Tasks that have been completed or Incidents (defects) that have been fixed. This gives unparalleled traceability across the development lifecycle.

SpiraPlan provides the ability to integrate with continuous integration build servers such as Hudson and CruiseControl so that the status of builds can be recorded in SpiraPlan and linked to source code revisions and incidents. This provides traceability for each build, so that you can see what was changed in each build, what was tested and what was fixed.

SpiraPlan includes an extensive library of printable reports and graphical charts. The reports can be customized through extensible XML based report templates. The supported report formats include: MS-Word, MS-Excel, HTML, Adobe Acrobat and MS-Project.

Customization and configuration are critical for ensuring that a system integrates seamlessly your business processes. SpiraPlan can be configured and customized without any coding or scripting. You can create custom properties throughout the system, customize all the incident fields (status, priority, severity, etc.), create customized email templates, and configure custom workflows for managing your lifecycle.

SpiraPlan has an extensive administration capability that can be accessed using just a web-browser. To reduce the burden on IT staff, you can delegate project administration to different users, allowing project managers to be self-sufficient.

Developers responsible for developing the software code typically need to work in powerful IDEs that are appropriate to the type of the software being developed. Therefore to maximize efficiency and improve productivity, developers can now access their SpiraPlan information directly within their existing IDE. For Visual Studio, there is an Add-In that snaps into the existing Solution Explorer, adding a project explorer that displays the assigned requirements, tasks and incidents. You can open up any of the artifacts in the main viewing pane and act on them accordingly. For Eclipse users, we have used the Mylyn task-focused interface to deliver SpiraPlan information directly into the Mylyn task repository so that using SpiraTeam is as familiar as any other part of the Eclipse environment.