Agile Development Blog

[ UPDATE:  Fall 2009 Locations have now been announced for Boston, Seattle, Chicago and London ]

In December 2008, we ran the prototype to our recently announced Agile Success Tour in Austin, Texas.  This event was extremely well received, and the majority of attendees would recommend this event to their colleagues.   Given the high satisfaction level, I can almost guarantee you will not want to miss the one nearest you.  So consider registering for upcoming events in Denver, Los Angeles or New York City.  Short of living in Chicago and attending Agile 2009 in August, it has to be the best way to learn from your local peers about the actual benefits and best practices of adopting, scaling and cutting costs with Agile software development.

I was the moderator at our Austin event and while there, we captured short videos of our customers/presenters.  These customer videos give you a sample of what you can expect to see and feel in your community.

The videos include comments from:

• Israel Gat – former VP of Development at BMC
• Jack Yang –Director of Engineering, HomeAway
• Gary Allison – VP of Engineering, Convio
• Erik Huddleston — CTO, Inovis

I really enjoyed two things about the event.  First, attendees got to hear and discuss multiple approaches to Agile adoption, tooling Agile lifecycle management and the business drivers that drove their move to Agile.  Second, the interplay between local leaders, including members of the Agile Austin community, resulted in shared learning while enhancing the local professional network.  In addition to a brief presentation by Israel, these gentlemen were all allotted enough time to share their stories, answer a few of my questions and field audience questions.  Following the panel, breakout groups allowed folks to dive deep on hot topics, get introductions to Rally partners and learn about major enhancements to Rally’s services and applications for Agile lifecycle management.  Of course the event was executed flawlessly by our great marketing team including Sonya Breakstone and Michelle Burrows, and was facilitated by Julie Chickering, our Texas-based coach.

The Denver event is set for Tuesday, March 18th in downtown Denver.   This event will include:

• Peggy Reed — VP of Development at Avaya
• Lloyd Star — VP of Engineering/Development at Beatport
• Pete Fischer — Product Manager at eCollege
• Ray Bagley — Director, Product Planning & Management at Spatial

The Los Angeles event is set for Thursday, March 26th in Manhattan Beach, CA. The event will include:

• Christophe Louvion, CTO at Gorilla Nation
• Laureen Knudsen, Sr. Dir. of Program Management at Qualcomm
• David Annis, VP of Software Development at UTI from Arizona
• Chris Babcock, VP of Technology at Real Capital Markets

The New York City event is set for Thursday, April 2nd. This event will include:

• Jochen Krebs, Dir. of Program Management at AOL
• Brian Stockmoe, Sr. Dir. of Program Management at NBC Universal
• Land du Pont, Executive Dir. of Product at Conde Nast Digital
• Micah Silverman, Founder & Principal at MPower IT

So, please consider sending a senior member or members of your team to learn from and share with your local peers.  Additionally, Israel Gat is slated to participate in each of these three events, where he will share his stories and insights from BMC and other Agile organizations.

Registration is online and is limited to the first 100 people.  I do not believe there is an event with a higher return on your personal investment for these times.  Agile is proven to dramatically cut costs and increase innovation in any sized software development team.  If you are not realizing major benefits from Agile in your organization, you will feel the pull to get started at this event.

As a warm-up to these events, you might also consider having members of your organization attend or view the recordings of a new, two-part Webinar series on  Agile Cuts Costs that includes Jean Tabaka and me.

In this 20-minute interview with Michael Vizard, I do a wide survey of why Agile development practices can be so effective at cutting the costs of development and operation of strategic IT applications. Michael asked some great questions, including whether the current economic recession will stimulate change in the development process or cause it to stagnate, how people will train and staff for the coming changes, and how today’s ALM tools differ from what he refers to as the “old guard,” who are starting to claim that their tools also support Agile development.

Read related posts on:

Can you afford the software you are developing? (from Israel Gat’s blog)

Cutting costs through productivity improvements, and

WHY do you develop and operate software?

Let me know what you think!

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.