GARDEN GROVE, Calif., June 15, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Compuware Corporation (Nasdaq:CPWR) today announced at the Vision Events Project Portfolio Management Summit (booth #28), that it is helping its customers more effectively manage Agile development efforts by offering the Agile Accelerator, a pre-configured version of its market-leading IT portfolio management solution (ITPM), Changepoint.
IT organizations are embracing Agile delivery methods to improve responsiveness to the business. To maintain a comprehensive view of the overall project portfolio, Agile projects must be managed along with more traditional waterfall type projects in the same environment. Changepoint's Agile Accelerator delivers best practices to support the agile development process and the associated reporting requirements, giving customers a starting point to manage agile development within a broader portfolio of projects.
"We are looking forward to utilizing Changepoint's new Agile Accelerator to improve the effectiveness of our SCRUM methodology," said Greg Livingston, Director of I.S. Planning and Systems Development for Shaw Industries, Inc. "We believe Changepoint and the Agile Accelerator will improve system adoption and consistency across our organization."
"One of the most effective ways to improve the effectiveness of a team is to give that team more control over its own destiny. Agile provides a very clear set of approaches to team empowerment that can add value to any PMBOK-oriented management approach," wrote Dave West, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, in the research report titled: The PMBOK And Agile: Friends Or Foes?(i) "Using Agile methods has the potential to improve the degree of trust between the customer and the development team, enabling more-fluid delivery of requirements and more-efficient decision-making."
The Changepoint Agile Accelerator provides:
* Best practices for managing backlog and for adding requirements to sprints/iterations; * SCRUM(ii) Project template; * Sprint management configuration and reports; * Artifact management; * Key reports including: task boards, sprint task detail and burn up/burn down reports.
"While interest and adoption in Agile development are increasing, IT organizations are still also using traditional approaches. This requires a flexible ITPM solution to manages the total project portfolio and support these different methodologies," said Lori Ellsworth, Vice President of Compuware Changepoint Solutions. "Changepoint's Agile Accelerator helps our customers manage the end-to-end agile development effort--from backlog to retrospection--all within the context of the broader project portfolio view."
Compuware Changepoint is a business-centric IT management solution that enables IT executives to take a comprehensive approach to managing supply and demand--unlocking the potential of an IT organization to effectively meet the needs of the business. Using Changepoint, CIOs can deliver maximum business value through enhanced IT performance, improved collaboration between IT and business leadership, closer alignment of resources and activities with the business strategy, increased responsiveness to changing business needs and more effective life cycle management of the entire IT portfolio. http://bit.ly/zdbFC
Recently, Compuware Changepoint was placed in the "leaders" quadrant of Gartner Inc.'s "Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management" report. Gartner positions vendors in the magic quadrant based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. A complimentary copy of the report can be viewed at: http://bit.ly/xlWdv.
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Compuware Corporation
Founded in 1973, Compuware provides software, experts and best practices to ensure applications work well and deliver business value. Our unique approach, Business Service Delivery, helps CIOs optimize end-to-end application performance for leading businesses around the world, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies. Learn more at: http://www.compuware.com.
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(i) Forrester Research: "The PMBOK And Agile: Friends Or Foes?" January 22, 2009; by Dave West, Mary Gerush
(ii) What is SCRUM? http://tinyurl.com/nexvvp