News

Rally Buys Agile iPhone App, Makes It Free

• By David Ramel
• July 19, 2010

Rally Software last week announced it purchased an iPhone app that lets users manage Agile development projects remotely and has reduced its price from $15 to free.

Rally for the iPhone "allows users to check project status and health, re-rank stories or defects within iterations and backlogs, as well as edit work and create new work items," the company said of the app formerly known as ScrumAway, purchased from Blue Hole Software. It connects to Rally's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) software to view Agile artifacts such as iterations, releases, backlogs, stories, defects and tasks, the company said.

The tool, freely available on Apple's App Store, features a Home page project status indicator that displays the health of projects via progress bars that show "accepted stories and task burndown versus remaining work." A navigation bar lets users search and select projects or access assigned tasks with a single tap, Rally said. Bar graphs monitor accepted and to-do lists, and users can also access lists of scheduled stories and defects and edit them or add new ones, manage requirements with a drag-and-drop UI and view and edit tasks such as descriptions and estimates.

Rally for the iPhone's mobile capability "enables developers, ScrumMasters and product managers to effectively prioritize work, communicate release status to the rest of the organization and prioritize product backlogs to ensure that development teams are focusing on features that are the most valuable to customers," the company said.

The app has a three-star customer rating with nine reviews on the App Store, which states it requires iOS 3.0 or later to run on iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. Customer comments range from "virtually useless" to "just what I need."