Agile Development Takes Another Leap
Software developers looking to make their work more flexible have a get-together in Chicago this week
Rally’s ALM data warehouse will enable custom reporting, by allowing organizations to build the custom roll-up and drill-down reports required to deploy often scarce resources toward opportunities with the biggest returns. And because Rally’s new analytical database is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) solution it requires no customer infrastructure or costs to use and it is updated in near-real-time.
In addition, Rally’s new customisable user interface includes social media tools to improve collaboration among distributed teams. It also incorporates role-based dashboards to filter the data available throughout the development lifecycle to only what each role needs be a productive team member.
“A customisable user interface enables users to tailor their experience to fit their role responsibilities and preferred style of working. However, too many customisation options can become overwhelming for users,” said Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, in a statement. “The solution is to provide several pre-tweaked user interface options based upon the user’s role responsibilities and then let them tune that user interface to suit their personal style of working. The result: users will be happier, more efficient and the entire team will be more productive.”
New features in Rally Release 2009.4 and upcoming Q4 2009 releases include the new report designer, role-based dashboards, a recent activity stream, time tracking and faster performance. In addition, Rally delivers a Kanban mashup capability to support the Kanban method of agile development. The Kanban mashup gives teams the option of managing pull-based, Lean software development projects alongside other iterative and time-boxed projects.
Danube builds large Scrums
Meanwhile, for Scrum developers, Danube Technologies, a provider of project management tools and training for the Scrum methodology of agile software development, has released its new ScrumWorks Pro 4 project management tool.
The Danube product, initially launched on 3 August, enables large development organisations to scale Scrum deployments across the enterprise.
“Agile 2009 is the premier event for the entire agile community and ScrumWorks Pro 4 represents an additional proof point on the continued maturity of Scrum practices in the enterprise,” said Laszlo Szalvay, co-founder and CEO at Danube. “We are excited to officially introduce ScrumWorks 4 directly to the agile community in Chicago, and look forward to gaining continued feedback from hands-on practitioners that will help us continuously improve our products.”
Moreover, Danube officials said as Scrum continues to gain popularity among developers and managers, the framework which was originally conceived for use with small, co-located teams is being scaled to accommodate Scrum-of-Scrum installations of thousands of users. However, as many large organizations have attempted to translate the benefits of small team Scrum to enterprise-level installations, the available Scrum and agile tools lacked functionality powerful enough to accurately model such complex development, the company said.
ScrumWorks Pro 4 addresses the needs of larger development organizations by providing an intuitive way to track cross-product development at the program level.
