Rally Software Delivers Multi-Process Agile Support for Scrum, Kanban and High Assurance Methods

BOULDER, Colo. and SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 9, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Rally®, a title sponsor of this week's Agile 2011 conference, strengthens its support for multi-process Agile development with new and enhanced features for Scrum, Kanban (http://www.rallydev.com/learn_agile/chalk_talks/kanban_scrum/) and High Assurance methods such as those used in regulated environments. Rally's Agile ALM platform provides common progress dashboards, so multi-team programs can keep synchronized with their release goals, even if they use different development methods.

Rally's powerful roll-up capabilities give new visibility into the status of multi-team programs and improve predictions of how long it takes to deliver large, system-level features – even for organizations that use different development methodologies. For example, a Kanban team can map the columns on Rally's enterprise Kanban board to states in Rally used by a Scrum team, enabling roll-up and drill-down of status, progress and quality across multiple projects and teams.

For Scrum teams, Rally is delivering a new iteration overview panel that promotes Scrum best practices with built-in coaching that signals problems and suggests the right course of action to help teams get back on track.  

Rally has added a number of new Kanban features that include:

• Customizable defect charts - highly suited for Kanban teams, yet applicable to all teams working to analyze the quality of their development activities, new defect reports can be customized to match the cadence of the team.
• Class of service support - highlight a class of service, such as a type of card that should flow across the Kanban board faster.
• In-column aging for Kanban - shows how long a card has been in a column in order to identify blocks and keep work flowing.

Rally now provides a variety of dashboard panels and applications to meet specific compliance requirements in high assurance environments. New high assurance panels and apps include:

• Product Requirements Document (PRD) Traceability Matrix - allows the creator to select from their list of tagged PRDs and creates a trace report showing all of the features associated to the PRD along with test cases, results and design outputs.
• Software Requirements Specification (SRS) Document - generates a PRD document directly from user stories within Rally, which can be exported for formal signoff and storage in a document repository.
• Iteration and Release Traceability Apps - displays stories with their associated tasks, test cases and defects for an iteration or a release to highlight dependencies and assumptions in the plan.  
• Build Traceability App - provides a view of Rally artifacts (defects, stories and/or tasks) within a particular build, making it easy to identify what has changed from one build to the next.
• Release Dependencies App - displays a table of stories scheduled for the selected release that either has a predecessor or a successor to visualize risks, dependencies and the overall critical path.
• Complete Artifact-to-Artifact Traceability - provides detailed artifact-to-artifact traceability by linking requirements to the test cases, tasks, defects, changesets, and builds to which associated artifacts are tied.

For more information, sign up for the September 27th webinar on Agile & High Assurance Environments at http://www.rallydev.com/events/agile_webinar_series/. Or, visit the Agile in High Assurance Environments blog series at http://www.rallydev.com/agileblog/tag/high-assurance/.

Comments on the news:

"Kanban, a technique taken from Lean Manufacturing, provides application development professionals with a way to improve flow, optimize batch size, and ensure execution success in situations where pure Agile does not work," according to Forrester Research, Inc., in the report "Why Kanban Matters," March 25, 2011. "It also can augment Agile projects that involve more than one team, providing clear signposts to enable cross-team success."

"Multi-process Agile is a reality for most organizations, especially large pragmatic enterprises who are adopting Agile today," said Todd Olson, VP Products at Rally. "Rally provides the necessary roll-ups and reporting for delivering unified status and predictability across all of an organization's development programs."

About Rally

Rally is the recognized leader in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM). We are dedicated to helping organizations embrace Agile and Lean development practices that increase the pace of innovation and improve product quality. According to a study by QSM Associates, software-driven companies that rely on Rally's Agile ALM products and services are 50% faster to market and 25% more productive than industry averages. The company's experienced services group, including training through Agile University, guides companies through the organizational change required to become innovative, Agile businesses. Together, Rally's Agile ALM platform and its leading Kanban-based project collaboration tool, AgileZen, support more than 9,700 corporate customers, 126,000 projects and 112,000 users in 101 countries. For more information, visit www.rallydev.com.

Rally, the Rally logo, Rally Software Development, Agile University and AgileZen are trademarks of Rally Software Development Corp. Third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Rally Software

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