VersionOne Continues Agile Leadership with Web 2.0 Storyboard for Kanban Teams

July 29, 2009

Speed & Performance Improvements also Highlighted in Summer '09 Release

ATLANTA, July 29 /PRNewswire/ -- VersionOne, recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile management tools, announced today their Summer '09 release introducing a new Storyboard, support for Lean / Kanban and significant performance improvements throughout the application. Organizations that have a mix of Scrum and Kanban teams can now manage agile projects in the same system. Teams practicing "Scrumban," or Lean methods within iterations, can also leverage the Storyboard to support their process. Other workflow enhancements to simplify planning and tracking activities are the result of direct customer input from VersionOne's IdeaSpace, the company's product feedback forum.

Kanban in VersionOne

As agile teams adopt Lean principles, Kanban is a common practice used to help drive even higher levels of visibility and efficiency. The new Storyboard in V1: Agile Enterprise supports these goals through visual drag and drop tracking of story cards. Teams can customize Work in Process (WIP) limits to warn them when optimal capacity levels are being exceeded, helping them to address inefficiencies. Additionally, cycle time reporting shows teams how long it takes to deliver a story and helps teams focus on optimizing the delivery process.

Faster Performance

In addition to global performance improvements of 20% - 40% across much of the application, customers will experience 10x faster search and interactive drag and drop, including the Taskboard, Testboard and new Storyboard.

"Just as VersionOne was the first commercial tool to support a range of agile methodologies in 2003, we continue to be on the industry forefront in supporting leading-edge Lean and Kanban practices," said Robert C. Holler, VersionOne President and CEO. "The Storyboard and other new features available in our latest release enable teams to use any agile, hybrid or Lean process."

Additional Features

Several features in this release resulted from customer requests in VersionOne's IdeaSpace, the company's product feedback forum. By using IdeaSpace to help drive the highest-priority customer requests, VersionOne has delivered a number of valuable enhancements including:

    --  Increased Product Planning flexibility -  users can convert between
        stories and defects, split defects and add or import epics directly into
        the tool
    --  Expanded customization options - organizations can define required
        fields and designate custom fields to share across stories and defects

    --  Simplified Sprint Planning - teams can copy sets of tasks and tests from
        templates to the story being planned

Pricing and Availability

New features in the Enterprise Summer '09 release are currently available for all customers. Enterprise Edition is offered through monthly subscription pricing of $29/user/month or via perpetual licenses priced at $595/user. Existing customers who are running the Spring '09 release or who upgrade to the Summer '09 release of Enterprise are eligible for an unlimited free trial of Ideas that extends through August 31, 2009. For more information about Ideas and the free trial, please contact Sales@VersionOne.com.

About VersionOne

VersionOne is recognized by agile practitioners as the leader in agile management tools. By simplifying the process of planning and tracking agile software projects, we help development teams consistently deliver software faster.

Since 2002, companies such as Adobe, Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Motorola, Novell, Sony and Symantec have turned to VersionOne to help provide greater value to their customers. Today more than 10,000 teams and 70,000 users in 50 countries use VersionOne's agile project management tools to streamline and standardize their agile development efforts.

Whether you're a small, single agile team just getting started with agile development or a multi-team, global enterprise, with VersionOne you'll get the best tools in the industry backed by the pioneers in agile project planning and management.

VersionOne. Start small. Scale smart. See for yourself at www.VersionOne.com.

SOURCE VersionOne