Jama Software, the leader in collaborative requirements management solutions, today announced the availability of the Jama Connector for Rally, an integration between Jama Contour and Rally Software, two industry-leading solutions for enterprise organizations adopting Agile practices. Businesses choose Agile to speed time to market of their products, and to stay nimble and responsive to constantly changing customer needs. As development cycles accelerate, it is more important than ever that project teams ensure development activities align with business priorities. At the core of Agile is the need for real-time communication and decision making between business stakeholders and development teams.

With Jama Contour, everyone has a shared vision of the plans throughout the development process.Contour is a collaborative requirements management application designed for large enterprise organizations with distributed teams. Contour is flexible to fit any development process from Waterfall to Agile or a hybrid of processes. As the only solution on the market with the Review Center, Contour helps project teams connect with stakeholders to review, discuss and decide on the scope of projects to ensure everyone understands what the team is building and why. At any time in the lifecycle, both business and development team members can collaborate in Contour on key decisions affecting the product, schedule or budget.

Rally’s on-demand, SaaS platform lets distributed software organizations embrace Agile and Lean development practices and portfolio management methods that dramatically increase the pace of innovation, improve product quality and boost customer satisfaction. Rally’s solutions support each phase of the software lifecycle, from strategic planning through development, testing and delivery to keep everyone aligned with short, efficient delivery cycles. Contour’s integration with Rally creates an ongoing feedback loop, which gives everyone confidence that development activities map back to customer expectations and priorities.

“This integration automates the process of synchronizing business needs and other planning details from Contour with Rally’s Agile ALM platform to create a single source of record for decision-making across the business,” explained Todd Olson, VP of Products at Rally Software. “It provides an Agile organization with greater confidence that its development team is delivering products that meet the needs of its customers and the business.”

Key benefits of this integration include:

• Facilitating real-time collaboration and decision making across distributed teams
• Aligning everyone in the organization with Agile processes
• Maintaining requirements management best practices
• Syncing business needs with daily development activities
• Controlling scope and tracking changes seamlessly

The growing trend toward “WaterScrumFall”:
Business analysts and product managers often need structured requirements and powerful reporting to communicate plans to development teams and project status to business stakeholders. Developers and testers often want “just enough” requirements documentation and lightweight, Agile workflows. Both sides need each other to succeed, and information needs to flow continuously across the entire organization. The integration of Contour and Rally solves this challenge and helps enterprise organizations bridge the gap between product planning and development by supporting flexible, hybrid processes that blend structured requirements with Agile development techniques.

“The integration of Contour with Rally’s Agile ALM platform is a natural fit for organizations that are adopting Agile but must maintain formal requirements management best practices to meet their business needs,” said Eric Winquist, CEO of Jama Software, “For industries that require documentation for compliance, contractual commitments or other formal processes, such as Healthcare, Technology, Aerospace and Government, this hybrid approach of ‘WaterScrumFall’ is proving to be a successful way of working.”