Rally Software Introduces New Program to Quantify the Performance Impact of Agile Practices

BOULDER, Colo., Oct. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Rally®, a leader in the management of Agile software development, announces the formation of the Software Development Performance Index research program. Representatives from leading software development organizations, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and Rally are joining forces to quantify valuable insights about development work and provide feedback on how process and technology decisions impact development team performance.

"Rally shares a core strategy with the Software Engineering Institute - to openly engage a broad-based community with a focus on improving the effects of software in the world," said Rally's VP of Products, Todd Olson. "Both of our organizations have a passion for pursuing research into the efficacy of Agile practices, so I'm confident that this collaborative effort will result in valuable insights."

"The Software Engineering Institute has been pursuing its own research into the efficacy of Agile practices," said Dave Zubrow, Manager of Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis at the SEI. "When we learned that Rally had already made good progress toward measuring and analyzing software development practices in relation to cost, schedule, and quality impact, it became obvious that we would both benefit by collaborating."

Due to the nature of Rally's multi-tenant SaaS platform, Rally is in a unique position to aggregate information from across many of the world's largest software-driven companies to prove or disprove many commonly held assumptions about software development at scale. For instance, the Agile community has long advocated for dedicated, co-located teams consisting of between five and nine members. Research results, for example, will quantify to what degree productivity, responsiveness, predictability, and quality are impacted by wholly or partially following these recommendations.  

Rally invites interested organizations to join the Software Development Performance Index co-creation and research collaboration to help quantify insights like these. Participating customers gain immediate access to enhancements resulting from the research program, including dashboards, balanced scorecards, and benchmarking capabilities. Non-participating customers' data will be aggregated anonymously.

"Better measurement and analytics leads to better insight, which can lead to better decisions, which can, in turn, lead to better outcomes," said Rally's Director of Analytics, Larry Maccherone. "The key is to start by identifying the right outcomes and the Software Development Performance Index measures are being formulated to provide the outcome feedback."

The Software Development Performance Index aggregates a balanced set of metrics from the areas of Productivity, Predictability, Responsiveness, Quality, Customer Satisfaction, and Employee Engagement. Rally previewed the Performance Index framework at its inaugural RallyON conference in 2011, which was attended by Rally customer, Jack Yang, VP of Engineering at HomeAway. HomeAway is the first organization planning to participate in the research program.

"We were so excited about the Software Development Performance Index, we began implementing pieces of it over a year ago to help our development teams improve more quickly, make better decisions, and achieve better outcomes," said HomeAway's VP of Engineering, Jack Yang. "Putting these measurements in place is critical for benchmarking the performance and evaluating the efficiency of our development teams, and with the help of Rally, we're continuing to improve it."

Interested organizations, please contact your account managers, coaches or customer success representatives or email sales@rallydev.com.

About Rally
Rally Software is a leading global provider of cloud-based solutions for managing Agile software development. The Rally Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) platform transforms the way organizations manage the software development lifecycle by closely aligning software development and strategic business objectives, facilitating collaboration, increasing transparency and automating manual processes. Companies use Rally to accelerate the pace of innovation, improve productivity and more effectively adapt to rapidly changing customer needs and competitive dynamics. Rally supports 144,000 paid users and more than 1,000 customers, including 35 of the Fortune 100 companies.

Rally, the Rally logo, and Rally Software Development are trademarks of Rally Software Development Corp. Third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Rally Software