InfoQ

InfoQ

News

My Bookmarks

Login or Register to enable bookmarks for unlimited time.

The content has been bookmarked!

There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.

Rally's Agile Project Lifecycle Management Tool 2008.1 Released

Posted by Ben Hughes on Apr 07, 2008

Sections
Process & Practices,
Development
Topics
Agile in the Enterprise ,
Agile ,
Artifacts & Tools
Tags
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.
  • This article is part of a featured topic series on Agile

No comments

Watch Thread Reply

Educational Content

Jesper Boeg on Priming Kanban

In this interview, Jesper Boeg, author of the new InfoQ book – Priming Kanban, discusses the keys to using Kanban effectively, and how to get started if you are currently using other approaches.

New-age Transactional Systems - Not Your Grandpa's OLTP

John Hugg discusses high volume transaction processing applications with high and low frequency profiles, and how VoltDB can be used for that purpose.

Cool Code

Kevlin Henney examines code samples to see what can be learned from them starting from the premise that one won’t write great code unless he knows how to read it.

Collaboration: At the Extremities of Extreme

Jason Ayers share the observations he made watching a team of developers collaborating in real time on the same code base, pushing XP, pair programming and continuous integration to their extremes.

Yesod Web Framework

Michael Snoyman presents Yesod, a web framework written in Haskell and containing a web server, templating, ORM, libraries (templating, gravatar, etc.).

Transactions without Transactions

Richard Kreuter and Kyle Banker on how to avoid classical RDBMS transactional systems by using compensation mechanisms, transactional messaging or transactional procedures.

Attila Szegedi on JVM and GC Performance Tuning at Twitter

Attila Szegedi talks about performance tuning Java and Scala programs at Twitter: how to approach GC problems, the importance of asynchronous I/O, when to use MySQL/Cassandra/Redis, and much more.

10 tips on how to prevent business value risk

One category of risk that project teams need to ensure they address is business value failure – delivering a product that fails to provide value for the business investor.