VMC Consulting and Rally Software have partnered to host an Agile Café event in Bellevue on Wednesday, November 2, 2011. This event focuses on Agile development best practices and practical application, including discussions from VMC and Rally experts showcasing how Rally’s software helped bring a successful Agile culture to a client company. The event will be at the Westin Bellevue in Bellevue, WA from 9:00am-12:00pm PST on Wednesday, November 2.

“We have designed a session that gives a hands-on application of practices that we’ve found helpful in Agile development environments,” said Scott Bowen, Director of Software Development at VMC. “We will share some success stories on a project where we partnered with Rally, and then we’ll take you through some interactive exercises to help break down some of the cultural and social blocks that interfere with adopting and scaling Agile practices successfully.”

“I’m always excited to share real-world advice about Agile and some of the key characteristics seen in high-performance delivery teams and organizations,” said Ann Konkler, Agile Coach at Rally Software. “As an Agile Coach, I love helping others understand and achieve the benefits of an adaptive work culture, fostered by collaborative leadership and motivated teams.”

At this session, attendees will learn how Agile tools and best practices can increase visibility across teams and reduce defects. The benefit of establishing a strong foundation in Agile methodology, including meeting iteration commitments and successful release planning, can help an organization scale Agile from a single team to multiple teams or even across the enterprise.

The Agile Café will include presenting an Agile case study success story, a workshop by VMC on building teamwork, a Rally Software Demo and an interactive Q&A with VMC and Rally Software presenters.

Source:http://www.pr.com/press-release/365110

Rally®, a title sponsor of this week’s Agile 2011 conference, strengthens its support for multi-process Agile development with new and enhanced features for Scrum, Kanban and High Assurance methods such as those used in regulated environments. Rally’s Agile ALM platform provides common progress dashboards, so multi-team programs can keep synchronized with their release goals, even if they use different development methods.

Rally’s powerful roll-up capabilities give new visibility into the status of multi-team programs and improve predictions of how long it takes to deliver large, system-level features – even for organizations that use different development methodologies. For example, a Kanban team can map the columns on Rally’s enterprise Kanban board to states in Rally used by a Scrum team, enabling roll-up and drill-down of status, progress and quality across multiple projects and teams.

For Scrum teams, Rally is delivering a new iteration overview panel that promotes Scrum best practices with built-in coaching that signals problems and suggests the right course of action to help teams get back on track.

Rally has added a number of new Kanban features that include:

Customizable defect charts – highly suited for Kanban teams, yet applicable to all teams working to analyze the quality of their development activities, new defect reports can be customized to match the cadence of the team.

Class of service support – highlight a class of service, such as a type of card that should flow across the Kanban board faster.
In-column aging for Kanban – shows how long a card has been in a column in order to identify blocks and keep work flowing.

Rally now provides a variety of dashboard panels and applications to meet specific compliance requirements in high assurance environments. New high assurance panels and apps include:
Product Requirements Document (PRD) Traceability Matrix – allows the creator to select from their list of tagged PRDs and creates a trace report showing all of the features associated to the PRD along with test cases, results and design outputs.
Software Requirements Specification (SRS) Document – generates a PRD document directly from user stories within Rally, which can be exported for formal signoff and storage in a document repository.
Iteration and Release Traceability Apps – displays stories with their associated tasks, test cases and defects for an iteration or a release to highlight dependencies and assumptions in the plan.
Build Traceability App – provides a view of Rally artifacts (defects, stories and/or tasks) within a particular build, making it easy to identify what has changed from one build to the next.
Release Dependencies App – displays a table of stories scheduled for the selected release that either has a predecessor or a successor to visualize risks, dependencies and the overall critical path.
Complete Artifact-to-Artifact Traceability – provides detailed artifact-to-artifact traceability by linking requirements to the test cases, tasks, defects, changesets, and builds to which associated artifacts are tied.

Source:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rally-software-delivers-multi-process-agile-support-for-scrum-kanban-and-high-assurance-methods-127307593.html