Rally Software Unveils New Time Tracking Module So Stakeholders Can Better Plan and Track Project Costs without Disrupting Team Flow

Rally Also Bolsters its ALM Data Warehouse in the Cloud with New and Enhanced Custom Reporting Features

BOULDER, Colo.-- Rally^®, the Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) leader, today unveiled the latest release of its Agile ALM solution. Rally release 2009.5 adds a new time tracking module called Rally Time Tracker and enhanced custom reporting features that give development executives and program management offices (PMOs) visibility into project status and costs in terms that are familiar to their role. Powered by Rally’s SaaS-based ALM data warehouse in the cloud, Agile organizations can now more accurately plan, manage and track project costs based on the real-time data that matters most to their organization.

Rally Time Tracker captures timesheet information that goes far beyond simply tracking hours remaining on tasks, which is inadequate for producing accurate reports for project cost, capitalization and billing. The optional add-on minimizes disruption to developers and managers by integrating smoothly into Rally’s award-winning ALM solution. Team members can enter their time without having to go to another timesheet or application, eliminating the need for double entry, and the module offers open integration with other timesheet and PPM systems. Additionally, teams can use Rally’s ALM data warehouse to create a wide array of custom reports, matching the precise information needs of the business.

“There is nothing more essential than providing clear expectations to the management team when it comes to development, and a tool such as Rally’s enables us to do just that,” said Rob Hamilton, CFO of Bridgevine. “By having specific visibility to all facets of a project, we can accurately plan and manage our iterations, which ultimately saves resources and delivers a better product.”

Unveiled earlier this year as the ALM industry’s first, Rally’s ALM data warehouse in the cloud enables organizations to easily create the custom reports needed to confidently plan and deploy their scarce resources on opportunities with the biggest returns. Unlike other offerings that demand significant data manipulation and separate databases, the simplicity of Rally’s ALM data warehouse allows virtually anyone to quickly get answers to questions and share them across the organization. Building on the momentum of this initial release, Rally has released new custom reporting enhancements that let users group and filter data by defect fields (state, priority, severity, resolution) and test case fields (method, priority, type, last verdict), as well as any custom field on a Story, defect or test case.

“Every company has multiple stakeholders that require specific, real-time project data in order to track costs, manage resources and plan for future investments. Development teams recognize this need for transparency, but the disruption and time commitment to input and pull this data can easily derail a project,” said Zach Nies, VP of Products at Rally. “By leveraging Rally’s SaaS-based ALM data warehouse, Rally’s new Time Tracker module and custom reporting enhancements, stakeholders have quick and easy access to the specific information they need to make tough business decisions without disrupting project flow.”

Additional new and enhanced features in Rally release 2009.5 include:

• Customizable Backlog Page – Rally’s customizable backlog page simplifies the management of backlog items and allows users to add, remove, resize or reorder columns. In addition, users can sort their backlog by any column and perform drag and drop ranking. The customizable backlog page supports both in-line and detailed editing of Stories and provides a faster and more intuitive interface that enables users to view only the items they want to see, arranged as they wish to see them.
• Role-based Dashboards – New role-based dashboards for contributors, managers and executives make it easy to learn and use Agile processes and the Rally tool. Each role is provided with the appropriate starting point for their Agile initiatives with options to tune their view to match their unique needs. This gives users the ability to focus on the information they need to be a productive team member.
• Enhanced Custom Report Designer – Rally’s enhanced custom report designer increases visibility into status and quality across the development lifecycle. Users can create a near infinite number of custom reports tailored to their unique processes and use them to explore the root cause of problems and better forecast feature delivery.
• Program Dashboard Mashup and Widget: Similar to the Iteration and Release Dashboard, the Program Dashboard displays the status of each release in a program as well as a roll up of all releases.
• HP Quality Center Mashup Enhancements: The enhanced HP Quality Center Mashup enables users to relate Quality Center test instances to a Rally User Story.
• Perforce Connector: The Rally Connector for Perforce inspects the contents of a check-in comment and updates the Rally artifact's discussion with a list of files affected and optionally updates the state of the Rally artifact.

Pricing and Availability

New features are available to customers directly through the application. Rally’s Agile ALM solution is available in two editions. Rally Community Edition is free for up to 10 users, and Rally Enterprise Edition starts at $35/user/month. For detailed product capabilities, see Rally’s Edition Comparison guide at: http://www.rallydev.com/agile_products/editions/.

About Rally Software

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 1,800 corporate customers, 54,000 projects and 86,000 users in 60 countries. For more information, visit www.rallydev.com.