Using Intervals for Agile development

I was asked today if anyone uses Intervals for agile development. We do indeed have a healthy number of customers using Intervals that utilize agile development methodologies. In fact, we use methodologies very similar to agile ourselves for Intervals development and typically release updates every three weeks. Our approach is a sort of hybrid between true agile development and user centered design and we gun for three week sprints.

What we do is use milestones as releases and then attach all of the tasks for that particular release. We set the priorities of the tasks and instruct our team to work on the highest priority tasks first. If we can't get something in a particular sprint we want it to be the lower priority tasks/features/stories. If a milestone needs to move back a week Intervals will cascade the next releases and all of the tasks. For stories we just use tasks and we have a backlog module within our Intervals development project where we stash away features that are not on the current development plan. Probably the biggest omission in Intervals is any sort of velocity tracking but you can use customized task priorities for that to keep track of points. For us we know how many hours we have to spend per sprint so we focus more on the amount of work and the priority as opposed to the point value.

If you are new to agile and iterative development and would like to learn more, here are a few links:
Wikipedia - Agile software development
Principles behind the Agile Manifesto