VersionOne, the maker of Agile Enterprise, one of the leading agile tools for team organization and project management, has released two significant versions of their platform within the past few months: a free five-user community edition and 7.1 of their Agile Enterprise software.
The latest release adds integration with Subversion and Fitnesse, as well as a new Taskboard view. Taskboards are a common agile approach to project and task management, wherein tasks, often represented as index cards, are moved around on a board, like a whiteboard or corkboard. Agile teams may find this a valuable way of seeing and interacting with the high-level status of their project, from daily standups to task management. Integration with Fitnesse and Subversion makes feature-related FIT test results and subversion changesets visible when using VersionOne, allowing it to act as an integration point for the various tools used in the development process. Full details on these features as well as retrospectives and more are available in the release notes.
The community edition allows smaller teams to explore and use Agile Enterprise at no cost with up to five users, as long as support and automatic upgrades are not required. In order to install and use the community edition, you'll need a Windows 2000/2003 server on which to run IIS and SQL Server.
In addition, VersionOne has commercial hosted (SaaS/subscription) and deployable licensing models which do include support and upgrades. Pricing is relatively clear and well-published.
InfoQ caught up with Paul Culling of VersionOne to discuss these releases in detail. On the subject of the VersionOne API, and how it's used:Customers use the API for integration with tools from IBM (Eclipse/Clearquest) and HP (Test Director) and we have created the implementations with Visual Studio and open source tools FitNesse and Subversion both for our customers that use these tools and as reference implementations for guiding customers that do custom integrations.
We have also created a new open source customer request submission tool that works with the API. Although VersionOne has the most comprehensive reporting of any Agile tool in the marketplace, many of our customers are using the API for custom reporting – these are generally large enterprise customers that have specific historical reporting needs (generally non-Agile metrics/reports). We have a customer that pulls data out to do very specific earned value reporting. Another customer has integrated VersionOne with their time-billing system.
On the subject of features that differentiate VersionOne:
- Flexible Organizational Setup: Companies can dynamically define unique organizational structure to support multiple projects, releases and teams and provides for rollup reporting across projects and programs.
- Agile Reporting and Analytics: VersionOne provides 50+ pre-packaged Agile reports including: Executive level dashboards, Velocity and Burndown, Cumulative Flow, Custom Quicklists, Agile Gantt, Parking Lot reports and more.
- Integrated Lifecycle Support: VersionOne plans, tracks and manages features, defects, impediments, customer requests and acceptance tests.
- Deployment Flexibility: VersionOne offers both OnDemand (hosted) or OnSite (local) deployments for teams of any size, subscription and license based pricing and choice of methodology (Scrum, XP, DSDM, AgileUP or custom)
- Clear Pricing: Each customer (whether it be an individual team or enterprise rollout) has the same functionality and each customer chooses to use the functionality that best supports their Agile process without having to pay upgrade fees or hidden costs.
For more information, follow InfoQ's coverage of VersionOne, or artifacts and tools. Read more about this and other agile tools (ScrumWorks, XPlanner, Rally, etc.) in the Agile Tooling Survey results.