Team developer services gain ground

Hosted services for team-based application development will get a shot in the arm this week with new offerings from Rally Software Development and CollabNet. Also making app dev news is Oracle, which has forged tighter links between its database and Microsoft’s tools.

Focusing on agile development methodologies, Rally is expanding its offering’s planning, tracking, and communications features as well as linking to the Salesforce.com online CRM service.

Rally Release 5 features a Web-services API to link to Salesforce.com. Geared toward ISV users, the link tracks customer requests and product issues.

“Those issues transfer into Rally as requirements and defects,” said Richard Leavitt, vice president of product marketing at Rally.

Rally also is integrating with automated test tools from Mercury TestDirector.

Expanded planning and tracking in Release 5 enable scaling of agile project management to large, complex projects. Release 5 makes it easier to track activities of multiple teams. Feature-complete reports and program road maps are also in the new version.

Rally Release 5 produces alerts about changes in software that affect a specific developer. Notifications can be sent via e-mail or RSS.

Rally user Douglas Stein, a vice president at Learn-ing.com, said he was pleased with the integrations with Salesforce.com and Mercury TestDirector, as well as with the ability to track large projects. Learning.com develops online educational materials and its frequent release cycles benefit from Rally’s agile approach, Stein said.

“If you’re shrink-wrapping CDs, agile isn’t necessarily as good a fit. But for what we’re doing, it’s a perfect fit,” Stein said. Rally Release 5 starts at $65 per developer per month.

Meanwhile, CollabNet this week is announcing CollabNet Team Edition, a version of the company’s collaborative software development system geared toward customers with five to 50 developers. The system provides tools to integrate version control with issue tracking.

CollabNet Team Edition also costs $65 per developer per month. Team Edition is an abbreviated version of the company’s Enterprise Edition service, which offers more security options and a dedicated server to clients at $175 per user per month.

“We’re bringing this power [of an enterprise-class product] down to the smaller teams that otherwise could not afford it,” said Chris Clabaugh, vice president of business development at CollabNet.

Oracle, for its part, last week released a plug-in for Visual Studio .Net 2003 that allows developers using the Microsoft toolkit to build applications for Oracle’s 10g database.

The software is part of a broader Oracle effort to increase sales of its database software on servers running Windows. Oracle released a beta version of the plug-in, called Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .Net 2003, in February.

Features of the plug-in include the Oracle Explorer for browsing and altering Oracle schemas, and designers and wizards.