Rally Software Development has announced the latest releases of its applications and Platform-as-a-Service offerings for Agile lifecycle management. Rally releases 2008.5 (released Oct 25) and 2008.6 (available Dec 20) delivers new features by unifying silos that typically span the software lifecycle. New capabilities include one-button install of community mashups from the Rally mashup catalog, new integrations for products from Microsoft, IBM, and Jira, and the ability to plan and schedule regression tests within iterations and releases.
Rally's ALM 2.0 applications and platform are intended to make it less costly for distributed development organizations to manage the whole software lifecycle by customizing their Rally application to meet their unique needs. With 20+ pre-built integrations to commercial and open-source tools connecting all roles in the software lifecycle, Rally's Internet platform for Agile lifecycle management enables the open collaboration that drives enterprise Agile success. The open Rally platform delivers three capabilities:
Open web service API's and mashup and integration toolkits enable the "occasional" programmer to extend Rally to meet their company's unique work styles and reporting needs.
The ability to embed outside applications into Rally, and allow Rally screens to appear in other applications puts critical information on project status, progress and quality at every team member's fingertips.
Rally's community in Agile Commons gives users access to a catalog of fully supported integrations and mashups, many that can now be installed with a single click.
"Every enterprise and every Agile team is different," said Rally founder and CTO Ryan Martens. "By leveraging our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture, Agile organizations can create and deploy their own customized applications using readily available web components -- all with zero infrastructure costs."
Specific enhancements to the Rally platform include:
Rally's new "Get It Now" one-click install makes it easy to add any mashup from the growing Rally Mashup Catalog on Agile Commons.
The Rally Connector for Microsoft Team Foundation Server gives .NET development teams full traceability between source code assets and Rally stories and defects.
The Rally Connector for Microsoft Team Build displays the results of builds from Microsoft Team Build in Rally dashboards and optionally creates defects when a build fails.
The Rally Connectors for Microsoft Active Directory and OpenLDAP makes provisioning or disabling Rally users simple and efficient for large Rally deployments.
The Rally Connector for Jira is enhanced to fully coordinate Jira workflows for defect and issue management with Rally's lifecycle management capabilities.
The Rally Connector for IBM ClearQuest (currently in beta) provides bi-directional updates between defects in ClearQuest and Rally.
Other enhancements to Rally's Agile lifecycle applications include:
Regression tests allow Test and Quality Assurance (QA) teams to group tests into regression test sets and schedule them into releases and iterations, easing the management of frequent and early testing activities. (Rally 2008.6)
Greater administrative controls for large projects make it easy to provision access and permission new users into multiple projects.
New screen capture tool allows users to capture screenshots of bugs and quickly log them as a defect in Rally.
New cross workspace dashboard mashup gives development leaders a high-level status of all user stories across Rally workspaces. (Rally 2008.6)
Advanced burndown chart helps users gain better predictability into project completion by tracking changing scope during iterations. (Rally 2008.6)
New project dashboard mashup for Eclipse gives developers visual status of all of their team's work products that mirror the Rally dashboards. (Rally 2008.6)
