UK-based Countersoft has released version 5 of its Gemini project tracking software. Gemini 5 has been designed to provide "a single tool" for task and project tracking that can be used by software development teams, help desks, project managers, QA teams, and anyone else who has "project participation" needs.
Countersoft founder and CEO Harvey Kandola says that his development team has listened to customers who put Gemini to a wide variety of uses — ALM, help desk management, email-to-ticketing, project management, procurement, job management, consulting engagement control, etc.
One Tool To Rule Them All?
"People are growing tired of running multiple tools for team and project collaboration. We've all seen an explosion of such tools but they suffer from the same problem: narrow, niche focus. Typically, software development teams will deploy an Agile or Scrum planning tool and the QA guys will deploy their own Issue Tracking tool. Up until now, no single tool has had the depth of capability to go across multiple teams and solve those hard departmental process challenges," said Kandola.
Gemini 5 now introduces best-of-breed Project Templates so different teams can set up projects that work the way they work. Central to this capability is support for different taxonomy per project such as "Scrum" for Agile projects and "Issues" for Issue Tracking projects.
"Gemini provides taxonomy per project because such tooling needs to respect each team's unique speak. There is only so far you will get by shoe-horning a regular issue tracker into different teams. That's what we've been hearing from marketplace. So we designed Gemini 5 to ensure customers can consolidate all tracking and workflow across all teams, and dispense with multiple tools like Jira, FogBugz, OnTime, Rally, VersionOne, TeamPulse, and Zendesk. The alternative is to continue investing and managing different tooling and then hope you can 'connect the dots' with initiatives like the Networked Help Desk. But in practice people would much rather settle on a single tool than hunt for tool connectors," said Kandola.
Another aspect of Gemini is the AppNav approach to interacting, which is designed to give prominence to those things that are important to the developer. "AppNav is our way to ensure that you pin, share, and navigate around projects, tasks, and views that matter to you today," says Kandola.
Another area that has received focus is planning and managing large backlogs in Agile deployments. "We see time and time again the challenges faced by large teams running Agile: how to scale. Gemini 5 brings another first with Swimlane Scrolling — the ability for teams to visually manage large backlogs by bringing additional data into view the planning board," concludes Kandola.
Gemini 5 can be downloaded or used in the cloud. There is also support for social user login with Facebook, Google, and Open Id.
