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Customer engagement software maker Pegasystems has launched a visual app-development tool that it says speeds up real-time collaboration among business and IT staff to bring software to market faster.
Pega Agile Workbench, released May 31, uses an intuitive, sticky note-like interface to simplify communication by allowing business users to provide feedback and requirements from inside the app in a visual language that both business and technical users understand. This is designed to speed up versioning and patch management, which IT shops in many industries are doing with increasing frequency.
Despite the fact that more organizations are using DevOps principles and agile development tools, problems still exist in effectively communicating software needs and requirements between business and IT departments. Line of business people are most comfortable talking in business terms, while IT staff can get caught up in the intricacies of technology. This often results in miscommunications and misinterpretations with each iteration, leading to errors, lost time, cost overruns and failed projects, Pega said.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Pega claims that its Agile Workbench is the first app-dev platform to provide a seamless hand-off between business and IT throughout the entire software development process. Its no-code feedback environment leaves little room for misinterpretation and lowers development costs, the company said.
Pega Agile Workbench enables business users to give feedback or report a bug simply by pinning a digital note–as text, voice, video, or screenshot–directly in the application they are building. Directions can be as simple as “Move this search box to the top of the screen,” or “Present next best offer at this stage of the process.”
Pega automatically translates the feedback notes into a project task or agile artifact within a preferred agile project management tool (including Pega Agile Studio, CA Agile Central or Atlassian’s JIRA). This creates continuous and seamless hand-offs between business users and IT as they quickly iterate throughout the development process, the company said.
This real-time agile approach puts business users and IT on the same page – literally and figuratively. Pega says this results in:
- More effective collaboration: Organizations break down communications barriers with a visual, code-free interface using a common language that leaves little room for misinterpretation about what businesspeople want.
- Faster go-to-market: Streamlined workflows take agile development out of tedious email chains and deskside conversations and into a centralized feedback loop. This reduces the number of iterations needed, speeds development processes and gets products to market faster at lower development costs.
- Better software overall: By adding new value to existing agile development investments, the real-time agile approach helps developers turbocharge their agile processes to create better applications with fewer errors.
Pega Agile Workbench is unified in Pega Platform, Pega’s model-driven application development environment that the company claims is proven to develop software 6.4 times faster than traditional methods. It also extends Pega’s Directly Capture Objectives (DCO) capabilities to further simplify requirements gathering and cross-team collaboration.
Pega Agile Workbench, which comes with Pega Agile Studio, is available for free in June with the newest release of Pega Platform. Users of JIRA and CA Agile Central project management software can integrate these leading third-party tools with Pega Agile Workbench via a downloadable component from the Pega Exchange marketplace.
For more information, go here.