Aha Develop
Aha Develop is a new service from Aha.io, which builds on their successful product roadmapping application.
It’s an agile development tool with features including backlog boards, user stories, sprint and delivery management.
What is particularly interesting about the Aha approach is the fact they come at it from their position as a strategic roadmap tool, and integrate with it.
Typically most developer-centric roadmap tools are mainly feature pipelines, intended to manage the work of software development as a standalone function. This means there is no explicit link to the overall business strategy that is funding that work nor feedback loops to report on progress against that strategy.
In contrast Aha.io is specifically an app for strategic roadmapping, meaning that it offers features for capturing organizational strategy at the most senior executive level, such as a Business Model Canvas, Vision Statements and Strategic Goals.
Further features then enable this to cascade down through the through the product management, feature release scheduling and implementation of the work required to achieve that strategy, ultimately reaching individual development tasks.
Aha offers top down and bottom up methods for building roadmaps. As well as defining the high level strategy policy you can also open up an Ideas portal, so that you can crowdsource the individual user requirements, with each maturing into a more detailed Feature as it is approved and escalated.
GitOps
It also integrates with a number of other apps to round out this complete development environment. As they describe here and in this article, Aha provides a two-way integration with GitHub Enterprise that allows teams to send their planned work from Aha! to their team working in GitHub, and vice versa.
This means it’s a closed loop system. The Business team can break down their strategy into specific deliverables, feeding the DevOps work stream in the form of user stories, with reporting on their progress fed back up the line via the same app, and thus there is an end-to-end assignment of work linked to strategy, and back again.
