News

CollabNet Ties ScrumWorks Agile Tool To ALM Platform

• By David Ramel
• July 8, 2010

CollabNet on Thursday announced a new version of its Agile project management tool, ScrumWorks. The latest version was obtained in its acquisition of Danube Technologies and the company included its own application lifecycle management (ALM) software in the new offering.

Coming almost five months after the February acquisition, CollabNet's ScrumWorks Pro 4.4 is integrated with its TeamForge ALM platform, the company said, allowing users of both products to see and use Scrum assets in the other. Scrum components such as sprints, tasks and releases can now be linked with TeamForge components such as source code, wiki entries, e-mail messages and bugs, the company said.

In addition to the syncing with TeamForge, other improvements to ScrumWorks reported by CollabNet include changes to the tool's API "enabling bi-directional 'polling' syncing with other tools and ensuring future backwards compatibility."

Interestingly, the company included several features requested by users, a practice it has reported using before.

CollabNet said "community-requested features, including 'Estimated vs. Actual' reporting and an 'Original Task Estimates' field, were also added."

A Danube site member wrote this in a February forum post: "It would be nice to have an additional column in the export function where the original estimates for each task are listed along with the corresponding PBI index and the original PBI estimates."

A company representative replied that the feature was being worked on, and six days ago he announced the feature was in version 4.4.

The "estimated vs. actual" reporting feature was apparently sparked by an earlier post that prompted a huge discussion with dozens of posts that culminated in the same kind of "this is available now" announcement six days ago.

ScrumWorks Pro 4.4 is available for a free 35-day trial. It costs $289 per user for a year's subscription or $500 per user for a non-subscription license.