News

ScrumWorks Pro Goes Codesion Cloud

• By John K. Waters
• November 21, 2011

Collabnet on Friday announced the availability of its ScrumWorks Pro Agile project management tool on its Codesion Cloud Services platform. Developers have been running ScrumWorks Pro (now in version 5.1) on the company's private-hosted cloud platform for the past year. Now that hosted version is available on-demand directly from the Codesion multi-tenant environment.

The Codesion platform, which Collabnet acquired last year, hosts a growing ecosystem of open source and commercial tools, including Apache Subversion, Git, Trac, Bugzilla, CollabNet’s Agile ALM platform TeamForge, and other leading Agile project management tools. Making ScrumWorks Pro available on that platform means that users have access to all of those tools, as well.

Offering ScrumWorks Pro in the Codesion Cloud is, in fact, the culmination of the company’s strategy to bring enterprise application development to the cloud, explained David Parker, vice president of Collabnet’s Scrum group.

"This is a big announcement for us," Parker said. "It’s something that we’ve been marching toward for quite a while. Now that we’ve added ScrumWorks Pro on the Codesion cloud, development teams have access to a fully integrated cloud-based, Agile development platform that not only spans the project management layer, but also code management, source-code management, and publishing, all from the same platform."

The Brisbane, California-based provider of distributed software development solutions bet big on Scrum when it acquired Danube Technologies last year. Danube created the ScrumWorks toolset, and Parker says the organization is now about twice the size it was when it merged with Collabnet. The company acquired Codesion (formerly CVSDude) last October and immediately began offering Subversion in the cloud. Collabnet is the primary corporate sponsor of the open source Subversion version control system. Collabnet’s core platform is based on the technology, which emerged from a project that was started in 2000 by the company’s founders, technology book publisher Tim O’Reilly, and Apache project co-founder Brian Behlendorf.

Scrum is an Agile management framework, not a methodology. It defines a set of practices and roles for software development teams that is flexible and adaptable. Providing this framework in a cloud, argues Guy Marion, vice president in CollabNet’s cloud services group, is the best way to support Agile in the enterprise.

"Agile is now mainstream, and the management of the Agile lifecycle is maturing and reaching deeper into the enterprise," Marion said. "Collaborative teams are commonly using program management software like ScrumWorks Pro. And more importantly, the Agile software development methodology is really scaling and being embraced by large enterprises."

Marion, who was the CEO of Codesion before the acquisition, said that, with this release, Collabnet is responding to what the company sees as a growing demand in the enterprise for the integration of process, collaborative development, and platform.

"We definitely see this trend in the enterprise toward Agile ALM, the adoption of open source methodologies and tools, and the application of hybrid cloud platforms," he said.

ScrumWorks Pro is now available on-premise and on-demand directly from the Codesion Cloud. A 30-day trial version is available for download.