Dr. Dobb's is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.


Channels ▼
RSS

Design

Product, Support Management Tools Announced



Rally Software Development has announced new product management and support management tools that, together with Rally's Agile lifecycle management software, let organizations manage the entire software lifecycle from business case to deployment. Designed specifically for product managers and support staff working with Agile development teams and delivered through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, Rally leverages Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to help organizations close the feedback loops between development teams and users, ensuring development priorities are aligned with the highest value opportunities.

Rally Product Manager increases visibility and collaboration by enabling product managers and business analysts to collect user feedback, prioritize feature backlogs and radiate development progress to the entire organization. Product managers and business analysts can create user stories directly in Rally and display development status in salesforce.com's CRM system.

Rally Support Manager improves collaboration between development and support teams to accelerate the resolution of user-reported issues. Help desk and support staff can quickly submit defects and change requests reported by users and communicate the development status of these issues.

"Agile product managers face a unique set of challenges when trying to create value-driven backlogs and communicate development status," said Ryan Martens, CTO and founder of Rally. "By leveraging the user information and contact points in CRM systems, organizations can now bring user needs closer to their development teams and provide visibility into development progress to all stakeholders. This increased collaboration and visibility makes for a responsive enterprise -- one that listens to its customers and is recognized for delivering them true value."

Built on the salesforce.com Force.com platform, Rally Product Manager and Rally Support Manager are intended to provide product managers -- or anyone responsible for meeting customer needs -- capabilities such as email notifications, custom reports, dashboards, and workflow customization. By utilizing these solutions as part of the entire software lifecycle management process, organizations are able to:

  • Centralize user feedback. Product managers can collect input received by anyone in contact with users, raising visibility into all incoming customer input and saving time by centralizing all input in one area.
  • Prioritize development backlogs. Product managers are able to objectively score features based on forecasted sales revenues, number of requests, user demographics, competitive advantage and alignment with product strategy, and prioritize defects based on customer impact.
  • Track development status. Non-development stakeholders finally have transparency into the development status of feature requests and defect reports, ensuring the information communicated to users accurately reflects development's commitments.
  • Accelerate defect corrections. Support staff can quickly detect if development is already aware of user-reported bugs with search capabilities, reducing the creation of duplicate defects. When new issues are reported, they can quickly submit new defects to development.

"Product management and user support are the 'bookends' of the software lifecycle," added Martens. "In order for companies to become more responsive to their users, a better level of collaboration and visibility is needed between development, support and product management."


Related Reading


More Insights






Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

Dr. Dobb's encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, Dr. Dobb's moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing or spam. Dr. Dobb's further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

 
Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.