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.
"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."
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