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A Lighter, Faster ALM Process
Is agile development at a tipping point? ALM provider VersionOne in Alpharetta, Ga., is banking on it.
Is agile development at a tipping point? ALM provider VersionOne in Alpharetta, Ga., is banking on it.
Every quarter, the company is adding new features to its application lifecycle management tool V1: Agile Enterprise. Targeted at agile developers in the Windows environment, V1 offers customizable methodology templates (Scrum, XP, DSDM, AgileUp and hybrid processes) designed to lead distributed teams through the development lifecycle process from planning and tracking to release and iteration management.
The program uses a whiteboard planning metaphor. "We walk teams through the process of the release planning," explains VersionOne CEO Robert Holler, "taking features and defects and assigning those to the actual releases in a very visual drag and drop environment." The drag and drop method also applies to subsets of features and software iterations. Analytics such as velocity and burn-down rates benefit agile development teams.
The Q4 release, expected in the second week of January, adds several features, including default templates for features and defects and the option to use Windows Integrated security, custom attributes or fields. The Visual Studio add-on, available in Q3, is open source, allowing customers to customize the code or use it as a reference implementation.
"It's a very niche-oriented space, but it's an important area because you see companies shifting to agile approaches in development right now," says Melinda-Carol Ballou,
program director for IDC's Application Life-Cycle Management research.
V1:
Agile Enterprise is available as an on-site application or a hosted service. The license cost is $500 per user. The subscription cost is $30 per user per month.
About the Author
Kathleen Richards is the editor of RedDevNews.com and executive editor of Visual Studio Magazine.