Agile project management set for small teams

VersionOne launched an agile project management platform for small teams of developers this week and is sprucing up its enterprise-level product next week.

Agile development involves short, iterative development processes rather than planning out everything well in advance. This accommodates changes in requirements.

“One of the more significant shifts right now over the last six months to a year is [agile development has moved] from an early adopter [stage] to mainstream,” VersionOne CEO Robert Holler said. Previously, agile was the domain of teams of 20 to 100 developers, but now there are organizations that have 1,000 developers using it, such as in the financial services, government, and high-technology spaces, he said.

The company’s V1: Agile Team application enables small teams to plan and track agile projects, VersionOne said. Looking to entice users to try the product, the company will offer it free for a time for an unlimited number of users.

Capabilities include:

* The ability to import stories and defects from a spreadsheet and manage a consolidated product backlog. A story is defined as a feature or functionality.

* Prioritizing of stories via multi-item drag-and-drop functionality.

* Planning of multiple releases and sprints via a whiteboard interface. A sprint is a development iteration.

* Track releases and sprints.

* Generate agile metrics such as Burndown, Velocity, Estimate trends, and Cumulative Flow reports.

Many development teams rely on spreadsheets, bug trackers, e-mails, or homegrown time-tracking tools to manage agile projects, VersionOne said. V1:Agile Team is intended to provide a better alternative. VersionOne defines small teams as having anywhere from five to 15 developers, but the product can accommodate more.

V1: Agile Team is extensible via its API/SDK and open source third-party integrations. It can integrate with development tools such as Subversion, CruiseControl, Bugzilla, and FitNesse, enabling users to build a best-of-breed agile ALM platform, VersionOne said.

For users running multiple software development projects, VersionOne offers its Enterprise edition. V1: Agile Enterprise release 8.1 adds a capability called My Dashboard, providing a single source of insight into multiple projects.

Also featured is Testboard, with capabilities akin to an electronic whiteboard where test cases can be defined for various features.

Via an integration with the CruiseControl.net build integration capability, V1: Agile Enterprise provides visibility into stories and defects in each build in .Net-based development projects. The story perspective offers information on which build contains work toward completing a story and which build contains the completed story.

With defects, the build integration capability shows where a defect has been found or fixed.

Agile Team and Enterprise are both available in either hosted or behind-the-firewall editions. VersionOne anticipates that users starting with Agile Team could move to the Enterprise product.

While Agile Team is being offered for free at the moment, eventually it will be priced at $995 per year for a team of users.

The Enterprise Edition 8.1 is priced at $30 per user per month for the hosted edition and $595 per user for the in-house release based on a perpetual license.