The tenth gathering of Agile programming devotees (can it be that long?) began this week in Salt Lake City, chosen for the site of the original conference that kicked off what was then a revolution in programming concepts, and now is de rigueur.
Agile programming, the ability to write small bursts of code quickly and revise frequently, is everywhere, and a number of announcements from the conference this week are noteworthy. The original manifesto was created by programming luminaries such as Ward Cunningham, one of the originators of object-oriented and extreme programming and Jim Highsmith, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, who were early agile book authors.
At the show today, AccuRev announced Version 5.2 of its Software Configuration Management Enterprise Edition. This release adds scalability improvements, workflow integration, and embedding PostgreSQL. You can download a free five-user 30-day trial license.
ThoughtWorks Studio announced new enhancements to their Adaptive ALM suite, with upgrades to our Go release management and Twist testing solutions. Adaptive ALM, which includes the Mingle project management solution, helps improve team productivity, collaboration and the speed-to-market. It has a free one-year trial.
Tasktop announced its Sync product that allows IT organizations to synchronize existing ALM servers from multiple vendors and open source projects. We saw them last month at an HP event and came away very impressed with their approach. It works with a variety of ALM stacks, including HP ALM and HP Quality Center, IBM Rational Team Concert, and two dozen other leading Agile and open source tools.
More information about the doings at the show can be found here. Perhaps putting things into perspective, a December 2010 survey by Gartner shows that 14% of all IT departments use Agile methods, and that two thirds of all IT projects take more than three months to complete, with more than half being late. Not that we are drawing any causal connections among these three data points you understand. Just sayin’.
