Rally to Release New Agile ALM System

Rally Software, a producer of agile application lifecycle management software, will announce the third generation of its Agile ALM system, Rally Release 2009.4.

The new Rally technology features an ALM data warehouse in the cloud, Rally officials said. Rally is expected to announce its new technology at the Agile 2009 Conference in Chicago.

“Executives need to know which big features to invest in, when they will be delivered and how projects are tracking to budget,” said Zach Nies, vice president of products at Rally. “At the same time, development teams have to make hundreds of decisions for every release. Rally’s ALM data warehouse will provide decision support tools to instantly view status across distributed teams, analyze the root cause of problems, and better forecast feature delivery."

Rally's ALM data warehouse will enable custom reporting by allowing organizations to build the custom roll-up and drill-down reports required to deploy often scarce resources toward opportunities with the biggest returns. And because Rally’s new analytical database is delivered as a software-as-a-service (SAAS) solution, it requires no customer infrastructure or costs to use and it is updated in near real time.

In addition, Rally's new customizable user interface includes social media tools to improve collaboration among distributed teams. It also incorporates role-based dashboards to filter the data available throughout the development lifecycle to only what each role needs be a productive team member.

“A customizable user interface enables users to tailor their experience to fit their role responsibilities and preferred style of working. However, too many customization options can become overwhelming for users,” said Mike Gualtieri, senior analyst at Forrester Research, in a statement. “The solution is to provide several pre-tweaked user interface options based upon the user’s role responsibilities and then let them tune that user interface to suit their personal style of working. The result: Users will be happier, more efficient, and the entire team will be more productive.”

New features in Rally Release 2009.4 and upcoming Q4 2009 releases include the new report designer, role-based dashboards, a recent activity stream, time tracking and faster performance. In addition, Rally delivers a Kanban mashup capability to support the Kanban method of agile development. The Kanban mashup gives teams the option of managing pull-based, lean software development projects alongside other iterative and time-boxed projects. 

“Our teams store incredible amounts of data in Rally, and it has really become the hub of our development organization,” said Erik Huddleston, chief technology officer at Inovis. “Rally’s new custom reporting flexibility will give me the right information and make it actionable in a way that supports our organization’s unique ‘agile analytics’ needs.”

"Our global deployment spans nine countries on four continents, with our largest centers in China and India,” said Alan MacLamroc, chief product and technology officer at CDC Software. “By using Agile and Rally, we have been able to improve our speed-to-market threefold while dramatically reducing our costs. Rally’s new custom reporting will give us even more flexibility to tailor reports to meet the specific needs of our teams and executives by communicating our schedules and deliverables."

Rally said the new features are available to customers either directly through the application, or by signing up for a beta program in Rally’s online community, Agile Commons. The Kanban mashup is currently in development and is expected to be released later this year. Rally's Agile ALM solutions are available in two editions. Rally Community Edition is free for up to 10 users, and Rally Enterprise Edition starts at $35 per user per month. For detailed product capabilities, see Rally's Edition Comparison guide at http://www.rallydev.com/agile_products/editions/.