Agile Development Blog

In December, our friends Jim Duggan and Thomas Murphy at Gartner completed a long-anticipated report on what they call the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) space.  This space has been primarily dominated by source code management, integrated development, bug tracking and testing vendors.

With the rise of Agile development and growth of distributed development, the ALM space has expanded to include development management solutions like Rally.

This report is what Gartner calls the  “ALM Marketscope” and it is a broad evaluation of the ALM market and the providers within it.

There’s good news in the report from both a Rally/vendor standpoint and a customer standpoint.

Gartner estimates that sales of ALM tools totaled $1.26 billion for calendar year 2007, with a growth rate of 11.2%. With regards to the current recession, the report says, “Although current economic conditions will suppress many projects, we believe that the ALM market will stay relatively strong because of the value that ALM returns to a company in productivity, predictability, automation and governance.“

That’s good news for ALM providers like us for obvious reasons, but it’s also good news for users because it shows that real results are being achieved with the applications of ALM solutions in all sizes of software development organizations.

This next generation of ALM tools and applications are enabling better performance in software development even while software development is becoming more central to delivering business value, more distributed and more complex.  These advances are made possible through the use of new team collaboration solutions that are increasing visibility and transparency across the entire software development lifecycle.

We were admittedly also very happy to receive a “positive” rating in the report.

Here are a couple of quick hits about Rally
for the full report,  go to Gartner’s web site.

• Rally “has the strongest overall support for Agile.”

• “It promotes the use of ‘lean’ principles across the ALM life cycle and offers a strong, independent toolset that integrates with many products through a solid architecture. The product supports requirements, test case, defect, program, project and product management functions.”

• “It recognizes the need for more than project management and that more roles are involved than developers or project managers. The offering is flexible and well supported by Rally’s training and consulting offerings, including an online community and the Agile University.”

• “Rally has invested heavily in scaling to mirror very large and complex, multiteam organizational structures. They have deployments with more than 1,000 seats.”

Obviously, I am thrilled that we received such positive comments in the survey.  For a company that is only five years old, it is very satisfying to be ranked second only to IBM in this space.  Obviously this was a huge team effort to build Rally, but a special thanks goes to all of our customers who have engaged with us to shape our Agile lifecycle management platform over the last four years and 31 product releases on eight-week cycles.

It’s good to be second – we will keep trying harder!  Let us know what we can do to be better by commenting on this post.

About the Author: Ryan Martens is an avid outdoorsman, founding board member of the EFCO, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.