CollabNet TeamForge 5.3 to Include "Dynamic Planning"

A Breakthrough Approach to Managing Agile Development.

BRISBANE, CA - CollabNet today at ALM (application lifecycle management) EXPO 2009 introduced CollabNet TeamForge 5.3, the latest version of the company's award-winning ALM platform. CollabNet TeamForge 5.3 includes a significant breakthrough capability called "Dynamic Planning," which enables development teams to manage and model both project scope and timeline in a single user interface. The new release also includes an out-of-the-box best-practices Agile development template that enables teams to start an Agile-based project quickly and easily while still flexibly supporting other methodologies.

Dynamic Planning

CollabNet TeamForge 5.3's Dynamic Planning capability uniquely combines, in a single, compact "Explorer-like" graphical user interface, product management's "feature tree," which tracks the scope of development, with project management's "planning tree," which tracks development backlogs and time boxes. This unique planning interface allows any item of arbitrary scope (e.g., epic, story, task, or defect) to be flexibly mapped to any arbitrary backlog or timebox (e.g., product, release, iteration, or team), resulting in an easy-to-understand, centrally visible "Agile plan." Furthermore, a powerful burn-down charting capability is provided at every level of the hierarchy.

CollabNet TeamForge is the industry's only ALM platform to provide both a Web-based interface as well as full IDE support across Windows, Eclipse, and Visual Studio. This kind of modern dynamic planning capability is only available from CollabNet, and it greatly simplifies the collaboration of the project manager and product managers during the Agile planning and software design process.

"CollabNet's new Dynamic Planning capability is Agile-focused but benefits teams using any methodology," said Chris Clarke, vice president, product management and strategy, CollabNet. "Dynamic Planning leapfrogs the competition, enabling product managers, project managers, and developers to plan and report on releases from a single screen, with software development status continually available at every level of detail."

CollabNet TeamForge 5.3 comes with an out-of-the-box best practices project template to help project teams kick-start their Agile projects. The template includes a variety of pre-defined tracker types (epics, stories, tasks, and defects), a set of Agile roles to help manage project membership, and process guidance to help team members embrace the modern Agile methodology. All aspects of the template can be customized and used as the foundation for new templates, allowing organizations to define, manage, and refine multiple development methodologies.

The new Dynamic Planning functionality in CollabNet TeamForge 5.3 is a natural extension to CollabNet's integrated and extensible platform for distributed software development. For the first time ever, teams can now combine advanced Agile planning and reporting capabilities with a change management platform that tracks and associates all of the team design data during the entire software lifecycle -- from concept through deployment -- by correlating activity and content in a common underlying repository.

Pricing and Availability

CollabNet TeamForge 5.3 is a free upgrade for all existing CollabNet TeamForge users. The new release is expected to be generally available in December, 2009. Pricing for CollabNet TeamForge begins at $3,000 per year.