Were at the ALM Forum this week, where the hot topic is how to scale Agile and DevOps deployments. What Scott Ambler made clear in his opening keynote is that there isnt a single Agile best practice that spans the various sizes, domains, business processes that we find across organizations. While the practices and vendor tools implementing them vary greatly, the principles are consistent. Short iterations, automation, real-time collaboration and end-to-end traceability are critical to an effective software lifecycle. These principles are relatively easy for individual teams and startups to adopt. The massive challenge that mid-size and large organizations are faced with is how to reap the benefits of Agile at scale.
While Decembers Tasktop Sync 3.0 release extended our support to DevOps, the 3.5 release is all about supporting Agile at scale. Sync is now the lifecycle integration infrastructure for 5 of the top 25 world banks and powers many of the worlds largest Agile deployments. The larger the scale of the deployment, the more problematic the disconnects between tools and processes become. With Sync 3.5, we are introducing a new capability to our software lifecycle bus called Artifact Relationship Management. This provides the last mile of integration needed for large scale Agile. In addition to synchronizing the artifacts that make up your lifecycle, we now synchronize the relationships between those artifacts. The result is end-to-end traceability and for best-of-breed and heterogeneous Agile deployments. Which is pretty much every sizeable Agile deployment.
