February 7th, 2012 by Emily
Businesses choose Agile to speed time to market of their products and stay nimble and responsive to constantly changing customer needs. As development cycles accelerate, it is more important than ever that project teams ensure development activities align with business priorities.

Today, we’re announcing the availability of the Jama Connector for Rally, which creates an ongoing feedback loop between business and development. This integration gives everyone confidence that development activities map back to customer expectations and priorities.
“This integration automates the process of synchronizing business needs and other planning details from Contour with Rally’s Agile ALM platform to create a single source of record for decision-making across the business,” explained Todd Olson, VP of Products at Rally Software. “It provides an Agile organization with greater confidence that its development team is delivering products that meet the needs of its customers and the business.”
Key benefits of this integration include:
- Facilitating real-time collaboration and decision making across distributed teams
- Aligning everyone in the organization with Agile processes
- Maintaining requirements management best practices
- Syncing business needs with daily development activities
- Controlling scope and tracking changes seamlessly
“The integration of Contour with Rally’s Agile ALM platform is a natural fit for organizations that are adopting Agile but must maintain formal requirements management best practices to meet their business needs,” said Eric Winquist, CEO of Jama Software, “For industries that require documentation for compliance, contractual commitments or other formal processes, such as Healthcare, Technology, Aerospace and Government, this hybrid approach of ‘WaterScrumFall’ is proving to be a successful way of working.”
The Jama Connector for Rally provides a centralized collaboration hub where everyone on the team can see what’s being discussed, approved and planned in the product for your customers. The value of integrating Contour with Rally is that it provides your organization a best-of-breed solution. The development team can track their stories, tasks and sprints in Rally, while everyone in your organization can collaborate on requirements, track changes and capture approvals to make sure plans map back to customer expectations.
Read the Rally Integration Press Release >
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February 7th, 2012 by Emily

With Contour 3.4, everyone has a shared vision of what’s being built and why throughout the project to ensure development activities align with business priorities. Whether you’re using Waterfall, Agile or a hybrid of processes, Contour creates a collaboration hub for planning and management of complex projects. Three new features include:
VISUAL :: User-friendly Diagramming
With Contour’s online diagramming tool, create, share and edit diagrams to help clarify complex requirements and share your vision across the entire team.
SOCIAL :: Review Center Enhancements
Maximize the power of Review Center by enabling multiple team members to initiate and moderate reviews, add approvers and delegate reviews.
SIMPLE :: License Management
As a Contour administrator, you can monitor user sessions with graphical reporting to ensure everyone has on-demand access to Contour.
Read the Contour 3.4 Press Release >
Learn more & get the latest version of Contour.
Tags: Contour 3.4, Jama Contour, New Release, simple, social, visual
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January 31st, 2012 by Jonathan
FIVE: Losing the Forest for the Trees
The Challenge: In the early stages of a new Agile project, all is good. Your team is working on user stories, test cases, building features, and happily coding along. The vision and plan has (hopefully) been established and everyone’s excited about being outrageously successful. You’ve also comfortably tackled some of the early platform and architecture efforts. Now if you’ve already solved the first four challenges discussed, this challenge – Losing the Forest for the Trees – will be much less of a challenge. But as Agile hums along, the backlog increases, new ideas come into the mix, bugs stack up, and the development team starts getting tired and frustrated. Progress appears to be slowing down since more time is spent on bugs, design changes, and minor enhancements. At this point it seems easier to focus on what can get done over what should or must get done. You may start wedging in small features and incremental tweaks into sprints while bigger, more challenging – and more valuable – problems can’t be addressed since these bigger efforts don’t allow room to fix bugs and finish features. Decisions get tougher and frustrations set in. Your management team may even start thinking that Agile isn’t for you since the plan is not being delivered upon.
The Solution: As one of my client’s executives put it (and I’m sure he borrowed it from somewhere), “You need to keep the main thing, the main thing.” At this point it’s more important than ever to go back to the basics – clarify the vision, listen to real customer input, and focus on what the “main thing” is. What are the features, user stories, use cases, and other attributes that you MUST get right to be successful in the marketplace? As your solution gets close to delivery Agile can’t be a philosophical software development process, but a business process for delivering greater value to customers and competitive offerings to the marketplace. Use your Agile skills to make the tough decisions to cut less important features that aren’t complete, ignore seemingly critical (but not important) bugs and re-energize the team on those product attributes that your customers care about most. These tough decisions obviously can’t wait until the final pre-launch, but must consistently be made through the entire development process. While nothing provides more satisfaction than a complete product that does everything you want it to do, when the schedule conflicts with completeness (and it always will), err on delivering a solid solution that does less. Then, get it into the hands of real customers, learn, iterate and succeed.
Read part 1, 2, 3, 4 or download “The Five Challenges to Agile Planning” whitepaper.
Tags: Agile, collaboration, Product Development, Project Management, Requirements
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