ThoughtWorks Brings Agile to Application Lifecycle Management with Adaptive ALM

ThoughtWorks Studios, a provider of Agile application lifecycle management solutions and software development tools, on Aug. 17 announced Adaptive ALM, a new Agile solution for enterprise developers building ALM systems.

"Many traditional ALM tools focus on project management and require end users to adhere to the dynamics of the tool, rather than the tool adapting to an organization's processes and practices," Cyndi Mitchell, managing director for ThoughtWorks Studios, said in a statement. "Adaptive ALM allows teams to use their chosen development methods, while supporting engineering best practices that are vital to the successful development of sophisticated and mission-critical software projects."

Using Adaptive ALM, enterprises can "realize new levels of visibility and flexibility to better manage a wide range of software development methodologies and incorporate engineering best practices that drive productivity and quality," ThoughtWorks Studios said in a news release. According to the release:

ThoughtWorks Studios, the products division of the industry leading Agile consultancy ThoughtWorks, developed Adaptive ALM through the integration of its three flagship products, Mingle (project management), Twist (test automation), and Cruise (release management). The result is a fully automated solution that supports all aspects of software development and delivery lifecycle, from requirements definition and portfolio management to test automation, quality assurance and release management.

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"We just launched the final piece of our Adaptive ALM suite in Twist," Mitchell said. "With Twist we think we have all the pieces of our Adaptive ALM solution."

"ThoughtWorks Studios development tools are currently used by hundreds of customers in more than 20 countries," the company said.

In an interview with eWEEK, Mitchell said ThoughtWorks Studios decided to build its own set of ALM tools for enterprises using Agile development methodologies because existing ALM tools were not adequate for Agile development.

"We felt a lot of the tools were lagging behind what is needed in the Agile development life cycle," Mitchell said, without naming any tools or vendors in particular.

Yet, Mitchell also acknowledged that another part of the issue is that many organizations are only adopting pieces of the Agile development experience and "not adopting Agile wholesale." Indeed, "They may be doing stand-up meetings and other things, but they're not doing test-driven development or pair programming, etc.," she said.

However, the ThoughtWorks suite encourages the wholesale adoption of Agile development.

Moreover, "Using Mingle as the management hub for globally distributed and cross-functional teams, Adaptive ALM delivers the following benefits for Agile-based development: stakeholder visibility ... requirements management ... traceability and accountability ... quality management ... [and] test automation and deployment management," the company said.

"Our experience shows us that 'Agile-in-a-box' products, and focusing primarily on project management practices alone, does not guarantee Agile success," Mitchell said. "Adaptive ALM helps manage change and improves certainty of business outcome through collaboration and engineering best practices, like continuous integration, automated testing and refactoring, to help our customers minimize defects, eliminate waste, improve responsiveness and, ultimately, release better software faster."