The Agile2015 conference ran in Washington, DC last week with over 2300 attendees from around the globe.
This is the first of a number of news items that will highlight different aspects of the conference. This one looks at the sponsors who supported the conference. They were each asked to answer three questions – Who, What and Why. Who are they, What were they offering at the conference and Why did they chose to sponsor this event?
A significant change in the sponsor profile this year was the presence of some organisations looking to recruit people rather than selling products or services.
All the sponsors in the exhibitor hall were contacted and asked for the same information, not all responded. The responses below are what were received by the end of the conference.
A full list of the sponsors can be found on the conference website.
Upcoming articles will focus on the keynote talks and content of some of the talks. We will also provide links to posts and summaries from across the blogsphere.
As a title sponsor at Agile2015, VersionOne featured its Summer 2015 Release which gives executives and teams at all levels greater visibility to help develop and deliver software faster. Highlights included the introduction of VersionOne TeamSync™ for JIRA, Unified DevOps with ClearCode, and deeper support for Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe ®). VersionOne also launched its 10th Annual State of Agile™ Survey at the show. The survey is the largest, longest-running, and most widely cited agile survey in the world.
At our booth at Agile 2015 Hansoft gives the first public sneak peek of our entirely new product currently codenamed Hansoft X.
Hansoft X builds on a new philosophy of how to organize work in an app, based on what we learned the last ten years helping the most demanding teams make space rockets, games, and other cool stuff. We have brought this vision to life using a new generation of web technology making Hansoft X ultra responsive, equally on mobile and your web browser.
Hansoft X is simple enough to fall in love with. Powerful enough to keep. Designed for everyone from software developers, to managers, to marketing, to operations, to executives, to planning your wedding.
Hansoft X is a cloud based freemium product, and you will be able to play with it at the conference. And sign up to start using it for getting real work done.
Software is becoming the heartbeat of our society. It binds our lives and work. Software development is increasingly sophisticated and difficult, no longer the effort of an individual but the aggregated work of many.
At Scrum.org, we’ve assembled a learning community to help improve the profession of software development. We believe the building blocks of great software are creativity, collaboration, and short cycle development that allows you to fail and recover quickly to try again and succeed. Scrum is a straightforward framework that teams around the world have used to create all kinds of software over the past 20 years. Join us.
Digité, Inc. is a pioneering company headquartered in the Silicon Valley that provides web-based, integrated, collaborative Lean/ Agile ALM tools and solutions for the Global Delivery Model. Its product are -
- SwiftKanban, built with guidance from Kanban guru David J Anderson, has emerged as one of the top Enterprise/ Portfolio Kanban tools being adopted eagerly by Agile teams globally;
- SwiftALM, which provides leading-edge collaborative Agile ALM and Project/ Program Management tools that enable technology and project organizations successfully manage projects and applications, and collaborate effectively with their customers; and
- SwiftSync that provides connectors to over 35 software engineering and ALM tools such as Microsoft TFS, Atlassian JIRA, IBM Rational, Rally and many others.
With over 300,000 users worldwide, all of Digité products are available in SaaS and On-Premise versions. To learn more, please visit www.digite.com and www.swiftkanban.com.
SolutionsIQ is the leading provider of large scale agile transformation consulting. In sponsoring Agile2015, we decided not to focus on us, but on the community.
Our "un-booth" didn't feature any information about our suite of services, nor our successes in the space. No need for us to kill countless trees and produce hundreds of inky flyers. We instead used our sponsorship money and dedicated staff to capture some of the best and brightest thought leaders in the industry. Over the course of the conference we captured over 40 high quality video podcasts of authors, speakers, thought leaders for the purpose of making the information free and accessible to those that could not be at the event. By curating the best content, agilists from around the world could get real time quality content within moments. It's our way of giving back to the greater community.
All of this events content (and more) can be found on our website here: http://www.solutionsiq.com/resources/ or https://www.youtube.com/user/SolutionsIQ
Electric Cloud® is the leader in enterprise Continuous Delivery and DevOps automation. Electric Cloud helps organizations developing mobile, embedded/IoT systems, and enterprise web/IT applications deliver better software faster by automating and accelerating build, test and deployment processes at scale. Industry leaders like Qualcomm, SpaceX, Cisco, GE, Gap and E*TRADE use Electric Cloud’s solutions to boost their DevOps productivity and Agile throughput.
The company’s flagship product – ElectricFlow – provides an end-to-end DevOps automation and Continuous Delivery platform – orchestrating the entire delivery pipeline from code check-in through deployment. ElectricFlow enables enterprises to integrate and automate a disparate set of CI and DevOps tools to significantly accelerate all aspects of the software lifecycle. Its ARA module – ElectricFlow Deploy - was also recognized as a Strong Performer in the Forrester Wave on Application Release Automation, with the highest rating on Strategy in the industry. By removing bottlenecks, reducing errors, improving infrastructure utilization, providing shared visibility, and ensuring compliance and auditability requirements are met - ElectricFlow makes software delivery repeatable at scale, and as routine as pushing a button.
B12 Consulting has a global Agile practice, engaging some of the best Agile practitioners. We practice Agile not just in IT or product development; we take a holistic view in engaging the business and corporate leadership for long-lasting transformation and impact. We build feedback loops so that the Agile teams are continually getting input from their stakeholders and end customers.
We help our client build Agile teams, in varying engagement models. We enable our clients to leverage the best platform and tools, with the constant goal of automation and increased productivity. Our global headquarters are in Dallas, and our international hubs are Sydney and Bangalore.
Skytap provides Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) to transform the software development lifecycle and help customers deliver better software, faster. Today’s enterprise is challenged to continuously deliver new customer-facing applications, while overcoming increasing complexity in IT infrastructures. Our customers use Skytap to manage, share, deploy and decommission on-demand environments that contain everything needed to collaborate at each phase of the SDLC, without unnecessary costs and project delays. Enterprise IT organizations maintain full visibility and cost control, while allowing dev and test teams to self-provision labs and share complex environments with ease, for a lasting boost to agile DevOps initiatives.
Who is Agile Transformations?
We're a transformation enablement company who measures success based on our clients ability to transform themselves in a sustainable way. The culture side of the transformation is a key to our success.
What is AgilityHealth? We've developed our AgilityHealth Assessment and Growth tool for companies who are scaling Agile and want visibility into the health and performance of their teams.
Why: We used excel sheets and surveys ourselves and it wasn't scalable. We needed a more consistent way of measuring how the teams are doing and where we could really help in a targeted way. We also needed to see trends across many teams.
JetBrains is a leading producer of productivity tools for professional developers and development teams. We create tools that cover every aspect of your development team’s workflow, including project management, issue tracking, continuous integration, deployment, code review, coding, debugging, code coverage analysis and unit testing.
Our team collaboration tools are based on the main Agile principles and help your team follow various methodologies, adopting to your own process at the same time. Tightly integrated, our products perfectly cover your issue tracking and agile project management needs (YouTrack), do a continuous integration (TeamCity) and a code review (Upsource).
Agile2015 shows that the Agile community is at an Inflection point, as Agile moves from a guerrilla movement to the mainstream, being adopted by enterprise. Scaling Agile through methodologies such as SAFe is interesting but there are dangers where in moving from a group of self-organizing teams to a framework that if misunderstood and misapplied—this can lead back to the CEO in his ivory tower trying to manage his portfolio of projects from his iPad looking at status indicators and sending down directives to the teams. The challenge will be to avoid the new orthodoxy and keep the innovation and experimentation that made Agile such as revolutionary force in the software development community.
For Inflectra it’s been great to meet our customers, learn from practitioners, and see what our partners and competitors are doing so. This will help us continue to evolve our ALM and agile testing tools, so we can better serve our customers and the community at large. On a personal level, it has been great to see the Agile community come to Washington and help demonstrate how effective collaboration and innovation can be. There’s lots our elected leaders in Congress could learn from us, if only they weren’t away for their long summer vacations J
Mingle is an agile project management tool for teams and organizations who want to track, collaborate, and report. As a product of ThoughtWorks, Mingle has helped companies build awesome software since 2007. Its flexibility has enabled companies of all sizes to successfully implement -- and scale -- agile practices, from startups to major corporations like Cisco and Siemens.
At this year’s conference Mingle announced the first ever preview of Mingle Plus 2.0. Mingle Plus 2.0 takes a fresh approach to enterprise-level agility. Its team-centric philosophy empowers teams to work independently while providing management with clear visibility and dependency tracking. We came to Agile 2015 because this conference is central to the debate about the future of agile at scale. We think Mingle's new team-centric approach to portfolio and program management is a valuable contribution to this discussion.
Eliassen Group is excited to be a Silver Sponsor this year at Agile2015. There is much value in being a part of a conference of this size and immersing ourselves in an Agile focused community. We know being here and connecting with high level Agile enthusiasts will help to propel our company moving forward. Not only is there value in being able to promote our company and our services to those who aren't familiar with who we are or what we do, but it is also helpful to reconnect with people and companies that are instrumental to our success.
We are looking forward to continued conversations with those we know and are excited to start the conversation with those we have yet to have met. Please stop by our booth to learn more about what we do and how our expert consultants can assess your Agile readiness, train your Agile teams, scale your Agile projects and help you to deliver more value to your customers! If staffing shortages are holding your company back, we have an extensive network of Agile professionals we can connect you with. Stop by our booth and speak with members of our team!
Agile teams often struggle with functional testing due to the wide range of test management, manual and automated tools on the market. Software vendors have failed to deliver a test automation tool that supports Agile, because scripting is fragile, frameworks are expensive and time consuming. Even the best team average less than 30% automation rates across the entire product. To compound this, teams typically determine what to test by consensus or gut feelings, without direct, measurable correlation to business impact. Organizations are shifting away from expensive, complex tools to open source, but have settled for “just as good” cheaper. Tricentis was founded in Vienna, Austria in 1997, first as a process and practice consultancy, then relaunched in 2007 with the release of the Tosca Test Suite.
At Tricentis, our approach is still to put methodology first, by supporting intelligent test case design, to test the most critical use cases and features first, then automate everything possible. We achieve this through a unique approach called Model Based Test Automation. By eliminating the dependance on scripting and complex code, Tosca allows scrum teams and business users to create and manage complete test cases in plain english using drag and drop reusable application models. With support for both UI and API testing, modern applications, mobile devices, packaged applications, legacy platforms, databases and even custom controls, Tosca helps customers achieve 95% automation rates, within the sprint.
Spartez is focused on the the Atlassian ecosystem and agile methodology since day one in 2007. Several software teams at Spartez work directly with Atlassian on world-famous products, such as JIRA and Dev Tools. Spartez is also a leading JIRA plugin vendor, offering tools for both Server and Cloud. Over 2,000 companies from more than 40 countries use our software. Our Agile Cards for JIRA and TFS4JIRA add-ons are consistently in the Top 10 of best-selling JIRA add-ons on the Atlassian Marketplace. We’re based in Gdansk, Poland - the city of freedom. Of the 70 of us, 100% are warriors and 87% are code warriors.
We’ve come to Agile2015 because our founders attended and spoke at the event in the past. Agile Alliance annual conference is respected for the content quality and attendees' and contributors' passion for the topic. We’re showing some major new features in our bestselling JIRA plugins.
Agile Cards for JIRA - syncing the physical and digital boards
The attendees visiting our booth like the syncing of the JIRA board and physical board using our Agile Cards for JIRA plugin. The plugin is also capable of bringing more order to the JIRA backlog after reordering printed issues during a backlog grooming session.
Agile Poker for JIRA
Collaborative estimating in JIRA Agile is also generating attendee interest. We’ve developed two modes for our Agile Poker for JIRA plugin. One allows for creating a session with Scrum Master adding issues and players from any project. The new mode is seamlessly integrated with JIRA Agile and allows to vote with board live updates following all the planning poker rules.
New product - TeamHire for JIRA
Back in Gdansk our team is working on the TeamHire for JIRA, an applicant tracking system for development teams. It makes use of the JIRA board to visualise the recruitment workflow and collaboration capabilities. Our aim is to make the process fast and team friendly plus provide some data driven insights.
Neotys is a leading innovator in load testing and performance monitoring solutions for Web and Mobile applications. Neotys’ products NeoLoad and NeoSense enable Development, QA and IT Operations to quickly and efficiently test and monitor the quality, reliability and performance of their applications. More than 1500 organizations globally have selected our solutions because they are Agile, easy to use and support all RIA and Mobile technologies.
Neotys is a proud sponsor of Agile2015 because we believe that teams should be able to simply and seamlessly implement load and performance testing in their Agile environments. Many Agile teams have a number of tests that are running with their Continuous Integration builds but have yet to effectively integrate load and performance testing into that automation. We’re here to introduce NeoLoad and NeoSense, our load testing and performance monitoring solutions, that enable Agile teams to prioritize performance goals and automate testing with Continuous Integration servers like Jenkins.
With additional reporting by Craig Smith