Rally, Gupta focus on team-based apps development

Rally Software Development and Gupta, after making separate announcements, are looking to improve processes for team-based application development.

Rally on Monday is upgrading its hosted subscription service for managing software development projects, fitting it with a new user interface, import and export features, and faster performance.

Available now, Release 4 of Rally is the latest version of the company’s Web-based service for managing an “Agile” software development lifecycle. Agile development is defined by Rally as a process increasing the velocity at which development teams deliver value by improving visibility into a project’s features, quality, and status.

Sporting a new tab structure, Rally’s interface has been re-architected to allow for incremental adoption of the service. This enables, for example, development teams to manage release plans and schedules or focus on project requirements or test cases rather than having to use Rally for the complete lifecycle, according to the company.

“You can start from requirements management and then grow into managing the whole software lifecycle,” said Rally vice president Richard Leavitt. The user interface also provides for role-based adoption of the service.

“The UI is much improved,” said Rally customer Bob Pinna, president of MarketVoyce, a developer that offers software for marketing professionals via an ASP model. MarketVoyce practices extreme programming, or XP, in which new features are delivered in two-week intervals in small iterations and customers are involved in defining requirements.

“The interface is set up around the concept of XP story cards,” which are used for defining requirements, Pinna said. “Common tasks in the previous [interface] would take five or six clicks. Now, you can basically do them in one or two,” he said.

“The most significant benefit [of Rally] is it’s really the only tool designed around the Agile process,” Pinna said.

Improved performance in the service shrinks the payload between the end-user’s browser and the server, to boost performance on team development projects, such as those involving offshore developers, according to Rally.

New import and export functions in Release 4 allow developers to export and import development artifacts, such as schedules, in Rally. Developers, for example, can export artifacts to an Excel spreadsheet.

Rally’s service links Agile project management with tracking of requirements, test cases, and defects, with the intention of giving software organizations the visibility and team collaboration to respond more quickly to new opportunities and customer demands, according to the company.

Rally’s service starts in price at $65 per user per month.

Gupta, meanwhile, this week unveiled Gupta Team Developer 2005, a rapid application development tool allowing developers to use one source code line for Windows and Linux applications. The technology is available now in a bundle featuring separate versions for Windows and Linux, or they can be purchased separately.

“The source code is compatible between the two [versions], so you can actually write an application in the Windows product, take that application, go to the Linux product and recompile it,” Gupta CTO Charles Stevenson said.

“It’s a development tool that has team management capabilities built into it,” Stevenson said. “You can manage an entire team [of developers]," Stevenson said.

Included in Team Developer is a graphical code editor with a coding assistant, debugging, configuration management, database connectivity, and reporting. Also featured is Team Object Manager, which includes facilities for managing objects and projects. An IDE with a forms designer is part of the package as well, along with a reporting tool and a copy of Gupta’s SQLBase database, for use in storing source code files and project information.

The cross-platform bundle costs $3,495.