Rally Software's Founder and CTO to Keynote at Agile Development Practices West Conference

BOULDER, Colo., June 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Rally®, the leader in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM), today announced that Ryan Martens, founder and CTO of Rally Software, will deliver a keynote presentation at the Agile Development Practices West conference. Entitled "Moving Agile Beyond Software," Martens will outline how to build businesses that predictably deliver products through alignment and visibility across all parts of the organization. Jean Tabaka, Agile Fellow at Rally Software, will also lead three pre-conference tutorials and one session on various aspects of Agile and Lean practices.  

In his keynote presentation, Martens will outline how businesses can adopt Agile practices to develop a relentless focus on value delivery and problem solving. He'll give examples of how an "Agile Social Contract" between employees and the organization can build trust and outline a disciplined path for Agile rollout to support the vital task of ongoing organizational change rather than building islands of Agile practices.

"We share Ryan's vision of how Agile is expanding beyond software teams and across functional areas to create Agile organizations," said Drew Thoeni, president of Software Quality Engineering Inc. "I'm sure those attending Ryan's keynote will benefit from his insights into the Agile business and why Agile practices are growing quickly across organizations."

Ryan Martens brings proven leadership skills to dynamic, high-growth software companies and is an expert in assisting organizations transition from traditional development processes to more Agile techniques. Before founding Rally, Ryan directed product management at BEA Systems and the corporate adoption of Internet technologies within Qwest Communications.  At Avitek, one of Ryan's four start-ups, Ryan served as Vice President of Marketing & Business Development with Tim Miller, Rally's CEO.

For those not attending Agile Development Practices West, Agile Journal is hosting Agile Connect 2010 – a free online event that will enable visitors to watch a live stream of Martens' keynote presentation. After registering here, visitors with Internet access and a web browser can also visit Rally's virtual booth on June 9th and June 10th to learn, network and collaborate in a real-time environment.

Jean Tabaka, an Agile Fellow with Rally, will be leading the following tutorials and sessions:

• June 7:  8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. PST, "Better Decisions through Collaboration" In this exercise-packed session, attendees will learn and apply facilitation tools and techniques that support a collaborative mode of decision making for the planning, daily interactions, and review that are especially useful for Agile software development project teams.
• June 8:  8:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. PST, "Systems Thinking for Lean and Agile Growth" Jean Tabaka teams up with Bill Wake (Industrial Logic, Inc.) to offer systems thinking as a powerful guide for how to holistically evaluate Agile and Lean practices from a more objective, external perspective.
• June 8:  1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. PST, "Writing Great User Stories" User stories, a lightweight requirements documentation approach used within Scrum, offer Agile teams an efficient way to communicate software features among the team, plan iterations, and more. In this highly interactive session, participants will go through a series of simulations based on the life of a user story. 
• June 10:  4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. PST, "The Battle of Scrum vs. Kanban" Jean will lead an open discussion about Scrum and Kanban approaches, facilitating a lively discussion on how Scrum, Kanban, or both can lead to success.

Jean Tabaka is an Agile Coach with over 25 years of experience in the software development industry. She consults with teams of all sizes worldwide wishing to drive more value faster through the adoption of Agile principles and practices. For more information and a complete schedule of Jean's tutorials and sessions, please visit http://www.sqe.com/AgileDevPracticesWest/Schedule/Default.aspx.

Rally is exhibiting at the Agile Development West in booth 15/16 during EXPO hours on Wednesday, June 9 and Thursday, June 10. For more information, visit the Agile Development Practices West home page.

About Rally

Rally is the leader in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) dedicated to making distributed development organizations faster and leaner by dramatically cutting the time, cost and effort needed to deliver high quality applications. According to a study by QSM Associates, software-driven companies that rely on Rally's Agile ALM products and services are 50% faster to market and 25% more productive than industry averages. Rally's products were honored with four consecutive Jolt awards (the software industry's equivalent of the Oscar® award) in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. The company's end-to-end solutions for Agile development also include Agile University, the leading source for Agile training, and Agile Commons, the largest collaborative Web 2.0 community dedicated to advancing software agility. Rally currently supports more than 2,100 corporate customers, 58,000 projects and 96,000 users in 60 countries. For more information, visit www.rallydev.com.

Rally, the Rally logo and Rally Software Development are trademarks of Rally Software Development Corp. Oscar is a registered trademark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Rally