Richard Leavitt said ALM is getting lean and mean (well, maybe not too mean).

The executive VP of worldwide marketing for Rally Software has been around the software block for a number of years. He began his career with Hewlett Packard’s test and measurement group, and has since held positions like co-founder of Software Edge and vice president of product management for Insightful. He also helped start up Requisite and the RequistePro product line before Rational Software acquired it in 1997. Nowadays, Leavitt said he's seen two big trends in the application lifecycle management market: agile development and lean principles. With the current state of the economy, companies aren't interested in hearing about innovation and are focused on cutting costs, he said. Agile can help cut costs, and this has helped Rally in recent months.  

"Our ALM tooling is all built around an agile development idea," Leavitt told SD Times. "Agile shortens development cycles and dramatically reduces the amount of effort it takes to get a valuable feature set out the door. Agile and lean is the environment we operate in and what we bring to our customers."    

Of course, this "rah, rah, agile!" prose is not surprising coming from the mouth of someone who works for Rally, a company that has made its bones talking up agile development since it began in 2002. But when there's a potential to save some money in today's market, maybe there's some value to it.