Agile Project Management & SaaS – Low Hanging Fruit

By Michael Coté on February 22, 2010

Just about the best thing ALM vendors can do for development teams and organizations, I’d wager, is add a real SaaS offering. Especially if you’re in the Agile world, running on-premise project management (or, “Application Lifecycle Management” tools if you like to get all fancy pants, compliant, robust, and enterprisey) seems like the biggest help in the long term. Sure, in the short term existing teams would be best served by having their favorite features introduced – but take out the long term need to manage, upgrade, and run an on-premise project management system, and I think you’ve done a lot of improve part of the Agile development toolchain.

Of course, there are problems with this thinking: in the whacky world of cloud-driven dev/ops, you might need really tight integration between your daily (if not hourly) development cycles, builds, tests, and all the ALM wing-dings. That said, having cloud-based build farms and labs seems like it’d be advantageous if you can work out the network speeds. That whole concept was one of the things that made the now dead Project Kenai interesting.