Rally's Agile Project Lifecycle Management Tool 2008.1 Released

Posted by Ben Hughes on Apr 07, 2008

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Artifacts & Tools ,

Agile in the Enterprise

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Team Foundation Server ,

RallySoftware

In March Rally released their 2008.1 release of their agile product life cycle management product to their customers. Zach Nies, head of product development walked InfoQ through the new feature set, and talked through Rally's product development strategy and where it's going in future releases.

The new features in the 2008.1 release include:

• Integration adapters for IBM Rational ClearQuest, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and Seapine TestTrackPro.
• Drag & Drop capabilities across the software, including task ranking & reordering.
• Defect suite roll-up status.
• Enhanced release burndown charts.
• Personalized instant messaging integration for all team members.
• Expanded revision history.
• Acceptance test authoring and tracking.

Zach spoke of the process in which Rally use to realise their backlog:

Rally take a fundamentally customer centric approach to their development activities, providing a mechanism through the Rally Community website for customers to democratically vote on 'Feature Requests'. Each release (every 6-8 weeks) is driven by the customer base, with some 70-80% of effort based on customer requests which are democratically voted on to the backlog using 'Feature Requests' section of the Rally Community website (a platform previously commented on by InfoQ).

This focus on customer requirements, drives Rally's strategy on becoming an agile integration hub, interacting with common development, test & project management tools right through the project life cycle via its API to provide an entire program of work. The future for Rally holds more connectivity options for enterprise products to enable the embedding of Rally within their customers organisations, featuring:

• Management of required and hidden fields
• Custom reports and mash-ups using enterprise data from any source
• One click attachments for adding any document, screenshots or supporting data.
• Connector for Microsoft Team Foundation Server, for full traceability between stories, tasks and defects.
• Multi project support for HP Quality Center
• Connector for Eclipse enabling Mylyn context, to allow collation of Rally development status and source code context.

Rally's 2008.1 release is currently available as a free community version (up to 10 users) and an Enterprise edition, either as SaaS or on site installations. The 2008.2 release is out in early May.

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