Introducing Agilien: The Future of Agile Planning is Here

Agile development promises flexibility and rapid delivery, yet the journey often begins with a significant hurdle: defining the initial project scope. Product Managers, Project Managers, and development teams know the challenge well. Transforming a high-level concept into a detailed, actionable project backlog – complete with epics, user stories, and sub-tasks – can consume weeks. This crucial period, often dubbed "sprint zero," frequently feels like a bottleneck, delaying value delivery and testing team patience.

Imagine an environment where this foundational planning happens not over days or weeks, but in a fraction of the time. A place where the heavy lifting of backlog generation is handled by intelligence, allowing your team to focus on strategic refinement and execution.

We are excited to introduce Agilien, Visual Paradigm’s new AI-powered application designed to redefine Agile project planning. Agilien doesn’t just assist with planning; it generates the entire project foundation, transforming your initial ideas into a ready-to-use backlog in minutes. It’s the generative planning tool that accelerates your sprint zero, building the structure that tools like Jira consume for ongoing development.

From Idea to Action: How Agilien Works

At the heart of Agilien is an intelligent engine that understands your project needs. You start with a simple, high-level description of your idea – a new feature, a product concept, or a complex system. Agilien then applies its advanced AI capabilities to break down this abstract idea into concrete, manageable components.

AI-Powered Backlog Generation

Agilien’s primary function is to construct your entire project backlog hierarchy automatically.
Here’s what happens:

1. Input Your Idea: Describe your project in natural language. The more context you provide, the richer the initial output.
2. AI Analysis: Agilien processes your description, identifying key functionalities, user interactions, and system components.
3. Hierarchical Backlog Creation: The AI then drafts a complete, structured project backlog. This includes:
   • Epics: Large bodies of work, representing major functionalities.
   • User Stories: Detailed descriptions of a feature from an end-user perspective, often following the "As a [role], I want [capability], so that [benefit]" format.
   • Sub-tasks: Specific actions needed to complete each user story.

This process eliminates the tedious manual effort of initial backlog creation. No more staring at a blank page or wrestling with spreadsheets to conceptualize every piece. Agilien provides a robust starting point, allowing your team to immediately move to refinement, estimation, and sprint planning.

Visualizing Complexity with AI Diagrams

Understanding the relationships between different parts of a project is crucial. Agilien goes beyond text-based backlogs by generating visual representations of your project’s structure.

Using its AI, Agilien can produce PlantUML diagrams based on your project’s description and the generated backlog. These diagrams offer:

• Sequence Diagrams: Illustrate the order of interactions between objects or components.
• Use Case Diagrams: Define how users interact with a system and the functionality it provides.
• Class Diagrams: Represent the structure of a system by showing its classes, attributes, methods, and the relationships between them.

These AI-generated diagrams provide immediate clarity, helping architects, developers, and product managers grasp the system’s design and behavior without extensive manual diagramming effort. They become invaluable assets for design discussions, technical documentation, and onboarding new team members.

Agilien’s Core Strengths: Beyond the Basics

While AI-powered backlog and diagram generation are revolutionary, Agilien enhances your workflow with features critical for real-world Agile teams.

Two-Way Jira Integration: Bridging the Gap

Many development teams rely on Jira for task management and sprint execution. Agilien respects this established workflow by offering comprehensive two-way Jira integration.

• Push to Jira: Once your backlog is generated and refined in Agilien, you can push the entire structure – epics, user stories, and sub-tasks – directly into your Jira project. This populates your Jira instance with a well-defined project foundation, ready for team allocation and sprint cycles.
• Sync with Jira: As work progresses and changes occur in Jira, Agilien can sync those updates back into its planning environment. This ensures your high-level plan in Agilien remains aligned with the real-time execution happening in Jira, offering a single source of truth for planning and progress oversight.

This integration isn’t merely an export function; it creates a living connection, ensuring that Agilien remains a powerful planning layer above your execution tool. It streamlines the hand-off from planning to development, eliminating redundant data entry and reducing errors.

Gantt Charts for a Clearer View

While Agile emphasizes iterative development, understanding the broader timeline and dependencies remains important for stakeholders and long-term planning. Agilien includes Gantt chart visualization for your generated backlog.

• Timeline Overview: View your epics, user stories, and tasks on a visual timeline.
• Dependency Tracking: Identify and manage dependencies between different work items.
• Resource Allocation Insights: Gain a high-level understanding of potential overlaps or gaps in your project schedule.

This feature provides a different perspective on your project’s flow, complementing the Agile backlog structure. It’s particularly useful for communicating project scope and potential delivery schedules to non-technical stakeholders or for managing larger program increments.

Who Benefits from Agilien?

Agilien is built for anyone involved in bringing software products to life:

• Product Managers: Rapidly validate new product ideas, iterate on scope, and quickly establish a detailed backlog for their teams.
• Project Managers: Significantly cut down planning time, ensure project scope clarity from the outset, and maintain alignment between high-level plans and execution.
• Software Architects: Automatically generate architectural diagrams from project descriptions, aiding in system design and communication.
• Agile Development Teams: Start sprints with a well-defined, comprehensive backlog, reducing ambiguity and accelerating development cycles. New team members can quickly grasp project scope and system design.

Transforming Your Planning Process

Agilien shifts the paradigm of Agile project planning. Instead of extensive manual effort in sprint zero, teams gain:

• Unprecedented Speed: Go from concept to a detailed, structured backlog in minutes, not weeks.
• Enhanced Clarity: AI-generated hierarchies and diagrams provide a clear, shared understanding of the project scope and design.
• Reduced Overhead: Automate the mundane aspects of initial planning, freeing up valuable human time for strategic thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.
• Seamless Workflow: Maintain synchronization with existing tools like Jira, ensuring continuity and reducing friction between planning and execution.

Experience the New Era of Agile Planning

Agilien represents a significant leap forward in how we approach project initiation. It addresses the core pain points of early-stage Agile planning, turning a time-consuming bottleneck into a streamlined, intelligent process.

Stop spending weeks building your sprint zero foundation manually. Discover how Agilien can accelerate your project starts, improve planning quality, and empower your team to deliver value faster.

Ready to transform your Agile planning? Explore Agilien and see the future of project planning today.

Start your free trial of Agilien here!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is Agilien?

Agilien is an AI-powered Agile project planning application developed by Visual Paradigm. It generates complete project backlogs (epics, user stories, sub-tasks) and relevant diagrams from high-level project descriptions, significantly accelerating the initial planning phase, often referred to as "sprint zero."

How does Agilien use AI to help with Agile planning?

Agilien’s AI engine analyzes your project’s high-level description to automatically identify core functionalities, user interactions, and system components. It then structures this information into a hierarchical backlog, complete with detailed user stories and sub-tasks, and can generate visual diagrams like PlantUML.

Can Agilien integrate with our existing project management tools?

Yes, Agilien offers robust two-way integration with Jira. You can push your AI-generated backlog directly into Jira and also sync updates from Jira back to Agilien, ensuring your high-level plan remains aligned with execution.

Is Agilien suitable for large and complex projects?

Absolutely. Agilien is designed to handle projects of varying scales. For large projects, its ability to quickly generate a comprehensive, structured backlog from complex ideas is particularly valuable, providing a solid foundation that can then be refined by your team.

What is the main benefit of using Agilien for sprint zero?

The main benefit is extreme time savings and enhanced clarity. Agilien transforms what could be weeks of manual backlog creation into minutes, providing a detailed and structured project foundation. This allows teams to move into refinement, estimation, and development much faster, accelerating value delivery.

How does Agilien handle diagram generation?

Agilien leverages its AI to generate various diagrams, such as Sequence, Use Case, and Class diagrams, using the PlantUML syntax. It interprets the relationships and interactions within your project description and generated backlog to automatically visualize these complexities, aiding in design and communication.