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ScrumWorks Pro 4 orchestrates large-scale agile efforts


By David Rubinstein
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August 3, 2009 —  Agile project management software company Danube Technologies today released ScrumWorks Pro 4, its Scrum management framework that enables the coordination of multiple teams working in concert to reach common release and feature goals.

Agile development has been slow to reach wide adoption in large enterprises, because while the benefits to agile development are clear on the team or project level, they haven’t yet been seen in a broader context. This is due in large part to the pain of managing different groups of teams working on different projects in different locations but all working toward the same targets, according to Victor Szalvay, cofounder and CTO of Danube.

The problem, he explained, is with hierarchies, upon which many project management tools today are based, Szalvay said. While these tree-like structures are excellent for assigning, prioritizing and tracking work, they lack the flexibility to deal with changing requirements and priorities that are the hallmark of agile development.

“Prioritization is critical, but hierarchy obscures it,” Szalvay said. There has been no way “to coordinate component groups working to a common goal without subverting the agile process itself,” he added.

ScrumWorks 4 uses keyword tagging instead of hierarchies to enable managers to look at work from multiple dimensions, he said.

“This is tough to do in a hierarchy, where a single item can only reside in one place. Now, you can tag with one or more keywords and use the keywords to assign a feature-level goal,” Szalvay explained. “You can choose features for a milestone and associate the keyword to the milestone, applying all the breakdown items required” to reach the goal.

The subscription-based, US$289-per-user per-year tool uses the agile-familiar term Epic to define the high-level features and goals associated with any milestone, Szalvay said. There is also a free, scaled-down version of ScrumWorks.

Another new feature is the ability to share the work of one component group across multiple products. So, for instance, a group working on e-mail for the BlackBerry device can have its solution used in the Pearl, 7100 and other RIM products, with simple tweaks such as resizing the window or integrating with a different keypad easier to manage, Szalvay said.

Szalvay said ScrumWorks is now available to Eclipse development teams through a connector with Tasktop, the commercial version of the open-source task-focused Mylyn project.




Related Search Term(s): agile, Danube


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