Rally has acquired Flowdock, a social collaboration hub for teams. The acquisition will add unified communication and collaboration to Rally’s Agile ALM platform to ensure teams perform at a high level by keeping them connected and making the status and progress of work transparent.

Lack of loyalty is a serious problem in organizations everywhere today and software development projects. People don’t expect to spend their full career in the same company and are ready to jump ship rapidly if they think that they could loose their job or if the get a better offer elsewhere.

Agile methods in general have arise from a mixture of sound practice and good principles, but they lack an over all theory. Complexity Science, coupled with insights from the Cognitive Sciences challenges the basic assumptions of systems thinking and idealist uses of “self-organisation” alike.

Sometimes simple practices can be used to increase the efficiency of developers in software development projects. Fear of intervention of subordinates is one of the main impediment for efficiency and this is what Willem van den Ende discusses in this article.

Many companies adopt Agile because it is the natural thing to do. But do they know what they are getting into? In this talk we will use some anecdotes and lessons learned from Agile adoption to build a model that will hopefully help our companies adopt Agile in a way that affects positively their business.

To successfully create breakthroughs in your development effectiveness that are possible with agile, it has to be aligned with why you want to do it in the first place and what you need to achieve from it. This excerpt of the book Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development explain that you should be agile not just to be agile, but to drive the business results.

Collaboration is an essential ingredient in healthy Agile project communities, yet in my experience truly effective collaboration is perhaps the hardest thing to do well. We have become so adept at using e-mail, instant messaging, voice mail, and telephones to communicate that we have lost our preference for face-to-face communications.

Scrum.org and Scrum co-creator, Ken Schwaber have unveiled the Continuous Improvement Framework (CIF™) at the Microsoft-sponsored, ALM Summit 3 in Redmond. The CIF was created to help organizations respond to opportunities and challenges and to understand their return on investment in Scrum. CIF enables organizations to gauge their level of agility on a continuous basis and understand how effectively the value of their products is being managed. Through the use of designed metrics, it helps organizations identify and apply practices that will yield the greatest increase in quality, maximum ROI, …

Visual Paradigm International Limited announced today the release of Visual Paradigm Teamwork Server 10.1. VP-TS 10.1 introduces a number of new features, which includes allowed TW administrator to configure the permission of “manage reference projects” and supported PostMania in client products.

Rally® introduces AgileZen for iPad, bringing the power of Rally’s simple, real-time project collaboration solution to the iPad. Built natively for iOS, AgileZen elegantly displays projects visually on the iPad as an electronic drag-and-drop board. AgileZen syncs activity between its iPad and cloud apps in real-time to keep distributed team members up-to-date, organized and efficient.