ThoughtWorks Studios has integrated its Mingle (project management), Twist (test automation), and Cruise (release management) tools into a single solution called "Adaptive ALM" which is designed to automate the Agile software development and delivery lifecycle, from requirements definition to release management.

"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," said Cyndi Mitchell, managing director for ThoughtWorks Studios. "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 Mingle as the management hub, Thoughtworks Studios claims that Adaptive ALM delivers the following benefits for Agile-based development:

• Provides both management and development teams with real-time visibility across the development lifecycle.
• Supports greater efficiency and timely capture, management, prioritization and tracking of business objectives.
• Teams can track business value through the development lifecycle
• Lets business requirements serve as test specifications and provide automation of test suites and routine test deployments.
• Provides team control and visibility into test and release processes, and improves collaboration.

Adaptive ALM is designed to leveragea flexible "work as you like" approach to building out ALM programs that promotes the use of both new and existing processes and best practices across the enterprise, removing operational silos in the process.

"Our experience shows us that 'Agile-in-a-box' products, and focusing primarily on project management practices alone, does not guarantee Agile success," explains Mitchell. "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."