SD Times Recognizes zAgile's "No Tools, Open Source" Approach to ALM 2.0

It's quite a nice way to end the week with some great coverage from Jeff Feinman of SD Times.

Some of the more salient points that Jeff captured:

• When it comes to application life-cycle management, zAgile is saying, “Tools? We don’t need no stinkin’ tools!” That is the calling card of the latest company on the ALM block to offer an integration bus that allows for third-party development software. However, zAgile solely facilitates the use of outside development software, not its own.
• “We interpret ALM 2.0 as information sharing among the various products, and that’s what software information management means.”
• zAgile provides an open-source semantic framework, an integration bus that allows tools and methodologies from all companies. It touts the notion of software information management, which the company defines as the integration and management of information associated with all phases and aspects of the software engineering life cycle. The company gives real-time dashboards that track the performance of those tools.
• “We don’t get into the methodology or process religion: Is waterfall better than agile methods?” Lampitt said. “We accommodate the processes as to what the organization has. The one tool we do have is a process definition tool, where you capture the processes, and then you can instantiate your tools with projects corresponding to that methodology.”

And on our open source approach:

• In talking about the benefits of an open-source ALM framework, Lampitt said, “You’re not paying anything until you’ve proven it out in your own organization. You download it and say, ‘I know I need some integration, but I don’t feel like putting down a couple hundred thousand dollars just to see if it works.’

Finally, a nice summary quote by founder, Sanjiva Nath:

• “People were always trying to improve process, but I felt there were four things that ultimately make software endeavors happen successfully: community, knowledge, process and collaboration. I tried to envision a platform that brings all of this together, but not one that offers people a new set of tools, because there are 20,000 of them out there.”