Software Development Tools with ProWorkflow

Software Development is one of the core industries that ProWorkflow’s Nexus suits particularly well. Because the work is generally centred around skilled labor and the various tasks your organisation has to engage with in order to consider a project complete, Nexus’ emphasis on Items is directly very helpful in helping you manage that workload. It should also be noted that ProWorkflow’s own development team uses Nexus, and has been working at an accelerated pace as a result. 

Unclear or Evolving Requirements 

• Problem: Requirements often change mid-project or are poorly defined from the outset. 

• Cause: Inadequate discovery phase, weak user research, or product owner indecision. 

• Impact: Scope creep, rework, missed deadlines, user dissatisfaction. 

As with all industries, scope creep can be a problematic occurrence throughout any given project you engage with. This can be internal or external, with business managers sometimes translating client requirements into less than accurate deliverables. Nexus can help you deal with this through several core functions. Firstly, our custom forms can help record the original client request and responses and tie them to your project page. This means as the task list is being developed, you can retain quick access to the information that spurred the project on.  

Equally, because items can list milestones as well as tasks/activities, your clients will be able to view exactly what is being completed for each development cycle. This is especially effective if you use agile processes. Our messaging system will also allow you to contact and involve clients at any step of the process if clarification is required. Additionally because all project information is stored in one place, should any disagreements occur it will be immediately obvious where the breakdown might have occurred, and as such how to proceed with a resolution is much easier. 

Ineffective Communication and Collaboration 

• Problem: Team members may work in silos or lack clarity on priorities. 

• Cause: Inconsistent stand-ups, missing documentation, or remote work friction. 

• Impact: Bottlenecks, duplicated work, and low morale. 

Often, deciding exactly how much information a developer should have can be tricky. Of course they need to be well informed, however there may be information or activities in the project that may be too sensitive to share with all members of the project. With Nexus, you can restrict access so that certain members can not only see what they’re directly working on, but what work this relates to and what activities have preceded them. This way, your developers will know everything they need to regarding their own work, and you can still have some degrees of privacy related to certain parcels of data. 

Additionally, with intensive documentation relating to when a ticket was created, who created it, and when it moved statuses, your devs will know exactly who to talk to should they have questions. 

Inadequate Quality Assurance and Testing 

• Problem: Testing is deprioritised or left to the end of the cycle. 

• Cause: Time pressure or lack of dedicated QA roles. 

• Impact: Bugs in production, poor user experience, costly hotfixes. 

With Nexus’ litany of categorisation options, building testing processes into your tickets is easier than any other tool in the market. Here at ProWorkflow, we use the workstage and phase features to great effect. Bugs are captured via a standardised template, so collected details directly state the bugs point of origin, and steps to replicate. From there, the tickets are moved from a bug backlog into the relevant sprint. At this time, workstages will determine if it’s being worked on, and then, if it’s ready for testing. The dev team can then work directly with the testing team to kick tickets back and forth until we are satisfied they have been resolved. By inserting testing processes into our core statuses, we can ensure that no issue is left with substandard QA. 

Ineffective Prioritisation and Backlog Management 

• Problem: Backlogs become bloated, unstructured, or full of low-value work. 

• Cause: Weak product ownership or indecisive stakeholders. 

• Impact: Time wasted on non-strategic features, delays to core deliverables. 

In our case, Nexus’ “Created By” and “Prioritization” fields have become invaluable in ensuring effective backlog management. By keeping clear track of who created all of our tickets, ownership is emphasised, and each given member can easily find and promote tickets that have remained in the backlog for too long. We’re also able to mark certain tickets based on broad spanning impact, for instance production bugs affecting high use features will be tagged appropriately and marked with a high priority. We also use phases to determine which tickets require further discussion and which are ready to be moved into a sprint at developers’ discretion. 

Also worth mentioning is the fact that Items can contain costs, bugs, tickets, and anything else you might need to track. Making sure all of your items are appropriately categorised means sorting through your project items to prioritize is a straightforward activity. 

Software development offers lengthy and complicated projects, with lots of varying expertise and moving parts that require constant review. Nexus keeps all of this information in one place, and will help you manage these review processes to make sure no given ticket/item is left behind. Nexus was made by developers, and is (at least in part) designed with the troubles faced by this industry in mind.