Senior Project - RIMs

With the move toward delivery of real-time business services, the dynamics of how winning companies perform software development and management has changed -- gone are the days when requirements are detailed in advance and long "big bang" development cycles are the norm. Today's leaders must adopt Agile techniques that execute multiple development activities in parallel in order to deliver high-impact software in smaller batches on quarterly or monthly cycles. Now, more than ever, the agility, speed and quality of development organizations directly powers the velocity and profit of the business.

Rally Software Development Corp. provides the software-driven enterprise with the knowledge, coaching and tooling needed to succeed with Agile development practices. Rally's new software development management solution allows software organizations to dramatically lower the cost of change in their development efforts so they speed value delivery to the customer. This on-demand, hosted environment helps outsourced, in-house and distributed teams concurrently define, plan, and test software releases that propel the business.

Rally's web application provides functionality required to manage the Agile development process, but the addition of third party functionality at low cost to Rally would greatly enhance the tool. The original idea for the project was to create a framework for integrating mashups into the Rally application, to make the addition of extra features quick, easy and cheap. However, AJAX and mashups are still fairly new, and no true standards for mashups had emerged by the time the project was completed. As a result, no strong framework could be built, so the project became a proving ground for particular mashups such as instant messaging and Google Spreadsheets and Calendars.

The software can take data from Rally and put it into a spreadsheet; it can synchronize Rally iterations and releases with Google Calendars; and it can store chat transcripts about Rally objects. The project is a collection of functionality that was implemented for Rally. Much of this functionality will be moved into Rally's production application in the near future.