Rally Customer Experience Report

Learning.com Transitions to Agile with Rally™

Like many software companies striving to improve their responsiveness through Agile development practices, Learning.com quickly found that their software management solutions lacked the integration, collaboration and communication needed to reap the full benefits of Agile. Through tooling and training from Rally Software Development, Learning.com is gaining the project visibility needed to align development with the company’s strategic objectives and hit its narrow, market-driven launch windows.

Overview

Based in Portland, Oregon, with customers in 2000 schools and 450 public school districts, Learning.com provides a hosted Web solution for schools seeking to integrate computer and technology education into their curriculum. Its flagship product EasyTech® is an online technology literacy curriculum designed to help students and teachers develop technology skills and use those skills for learning in all subject areas. Delivered as a subscription Web service, EasyTech offers a dynamic, interactive learning environment for students and a powerful management system used by teachers and administrators to plan and deliver instruction and evaluate and report student progress toward technology literacy goals.

Company Challenges

To keep its application tuned to fast-changing market needs and reliably hit release dates that are tightly synchronized with the school year calendar, Learning.com chose to adopt Agile development practices for planning and managing their software releases. Their first release using short iterations showed marked improvements in quality and timeliness over previous releases, but dedicating the effort to advance their Agile maturity and improve their supporting tools was constrained by always-scarce resources and tight timeframes.

“If you are adopting Agile practices to support your corporate goals, Rally is a wonderful partner. For Learning.com, Rally’s integrated tools and training clearly support our mission of continuous improvement and continuous response to market and customer needs.”

Agile also held out the promise of giving everyone greater visibility into the status of new releases. As a company that prides itself on continuous improvement and being customer-driven, Learning.com needed this visibility to better tie their development priorities directly to changing customer needs, corporate performance, and strategic planning.

With a co-located team of 10 developers and two product managers, Learning.com struggled implementing Agile development practices using a mix of note-cards, e-mails, Excel and Wikis. These issues were going to get worse as they add distributed development resources in the near future.

“Our initial tool support for our Agile development process was insufficient,” said Doug Stein, vice president of development and technology at Learning.com. “We started with paper story cards, but they’re hard to track and kept getting lost. On the Wiki, each page became its own story card, but this approach made it difficult for even the project manager to know the status of the overall project.”

Realizing an ad-hoc approach to managing their software projects was limited and not at all scaleable, Stein and his team searched the Web and trade journals for possible solutions. Uninterested in traditional, process-specific tools with their heavy-handed approaches and up-front implementation costs, the company discovered Rally and its subscription-based Web service that manages all aspects of Agile software development. By seamlessly marrying Agile project management with the tracking of requirements, test cases and defects, Rally looked ideally suited to support Learning.com’s full transition to Agile.

EasyTech is Learning.com's flagship product, a hosted Web application used by over 30,000 teachers and nearly 1 Million students for technology instruction and curriculum management.

Getting Started with the Rally Offering

Learning.com selected Rally to drive its Agile development initiatives due to their positive interactions with Rally staff and the tool’s unique ability to foster true dynamic planning and tracking of the release’s functional requirements. “We also like Rally’s hosted, pay-as-you-go subscription model,” Doug added, “it makes financial sense to push expenditures out over time so that our current resources flow more into advancing our products.

“Rally’s hosted model let us finish a thorough evaluation very quickly. Based on the immediate results we achieved, we signed on for Rally tooling and training,” said Stein. “Let me say that Rally’s training is outstanding. We spaced their 3-part JumpStart Web training modules a week apart so we could accomplish a little homework between sessions. The whole implementation has gone very smoothly.”

Learning.com started with release planning and project management functions, but now reports their team utilizes Rally for managing the entire software lifecycle.

Results with Rally

Using Rally, Learning.com quickly experienced a radical shift from being reactive to feeling in control of the entire development process. With a new development heartbeat and improved project visibility, Stein said his team spends more time developing great software and less time sitting through laborious planning and update meetings. He estimates timesavings from improved meeting productivity alone at over 10 hours per month for each team member.

“Rally is great for planning and design, and is helping us see where we want to go. It gives the product managers greater flexibility to make trade-offs so we now make more profit-based decisions as opposed to just trying to make the entire product work without crashing or chasing feature requests from the squeakiest wheels.”

With Rally, Learning.com has successfully shipped new versions of its software in record time and with great team enthusiasm. They have moved from initially using Rally to manage release plans and requirements, to integrating these activities with the management of tests and defects. In fact, the team recently retired its commercial defect tracking system and now uses Rally exclusively to simplify planning and tracking of all development activities.

With his entire team fully deployed on Rally, Stein says the adoption of Agile has exceeded his expectations. In addition to the development and QA team, their marketing and technical support departments all utilize Rally to view new feature progress and report customer feedback from the field. According to Stein, not only has his team fully embraced Agile methods using Rally, but the entire company now has a high level of visibility into the software development process. “Visibility and collaboration with Rally allows everyone to have a clear view of what’s going on without being a direct team member,” he said.

With a likelihood of out-sourcing down the road, Stein is also confident he now has the infrastructure in place to easily manage distributed teams.

“I would tell other people looking at Rally to consider Agile development practices as one important aspect of a high performance company. Once you agree to set up your business to work from market needs inward, it leads you to a tool and service offering like Rally. Rally is very fact-based so it supports a market- and value-driven operational philosophy very well. If you are adopting Agile practices to support your corporate goals, Rally is a wonderful partner. For Leaning.com, Rally’s integrated tools and training clearly support our mission of continuous improvement and continuous response to market and customer needs.”