Agile Development Takes Another Leap

As adoption of agile development methodologies continues to gradually catch on with mainstream enterprise development teams, providers of agile development solutions have begun to broaden their offerings to enable both developers who are new to agile, as well as experts.

At the Agile 2009 Conference this week in Chicago (24 to 28 August) in Chicago, vendors such as OutSystems, Rally Software, and Danube Technologies, among others are announcing new products or new versions of existing ones. A key theme of the conference is “Making Agile Real.”

OutSystems, a provider of agile software development tools, has announced a new, free Agile Platform Community Edition of its solution to give developers an easy way to create web business applications and use agile techniques without any vendor lock-in, the company said.

OutSystems said its Agile Platform Community Edition is a full version of the company’s Agile Platform that can be deployed into production for personal use or by small businesses with up to five concurrent end-users. OutSystems announced its new release at the Agile 2009 Conference on August 24.

“The Agile Platform offers developers an end to end solution for the delivery of web business applications that overcomes the development, delivery and change issues faced by enterprise IT shops when trying to apply agile methods,” said Mike Jones, vice president of marketing at OutSystems. “We anticipate that the Community Edition will lead to a grass roots growth in loyal users of the Agile Platform and eventually new customers.”

OutSystems’ Agile Platform is a unified solution, based on agile methodologies, that addresses the full life cycle of delivering and managing web applications. It can be used to integrate existing systems, compose and automatically deploy new applications, manage them centrally and drive change during their entire lifecycle, the company said

The new community edition provides a small download footprint, simple installation process, a getting started guide and sample applications. OutSystems also is making available a series of getting started tutorials to explore the Agile Platform’s capabilities for delivering rich internet applications.

Rally adds a warehouse

Rally Software, a producer of agile application lifecycle management (ALM) software is set to announce the third generation of its Agile ALM system, Rally Release 2009.4.

The new Rally technology features an ALM data warehouse in the cloud, Rally officials said.

“Executives need to know which big features to invest in, when they will be delivered and how projects are tracking to budget,” said Zach Nies, vice president of products at Rally. “At the same time, development teams have to make hundreds of decisions for every release. Rally’s ALM data warehouse will provide decision support tools to instantly view status across distributed teams, analyze the root cause of problems, and better forecast feature delivery.”