02.22.10
Agile gets a bit more mainstream
Today’s announcement of CollabNet’s acquisition of Danube is yet another indicator of the mainstreaming of agile development processes. Managing agile development was formerly the domain of purpose-built tools from providers like Rally Software and VersionOne; today, virtually every ALM tools provider claims to support agile in some way shape or form.
Even CollabNet did, although it was through a fairly klugey template atop their TeamForge core planning platform, which was not originally designed for agile processes.
Until now, CollabNet was best known for helping reinvent the ALM market by being one of the first tools vendors to actually profit from open source. One of its co-founders, Brian Behlendorf, was also a cofounder of the Apache Software Foundation, a group that took a commercial-friendly approach to open source licensing. One of the earliest projects of that foundation was Subversion, a source code change and configuration management (SCCM) tool around which CollabNet was founded.
Open source found its calling during the deflationary period of the early 00s, after he combined impacts of the end of Y2K, the popping of the dot com bubble, and the post-9/11 recession imploded IT budgets and with it, software vendor sales. In the ALM space, CollabNet got its mojo as the usual suspects – Borland, Compuware, Rational, and Serena – found their pipelines eroding. In tough times, developers were no longer going to pay a lot for this muffler – if it was commodity technology, they would not pay for it. CollabNet saw open source wave coming and figured out that if you layered value-add atop it, IT organizations would be glad to put their money where their mouths were.
Having caught the open source wave, CollabNet missed the agile one. On one hand that was kind of surprising, but on another it wasn’t. CollabNet represented one form of grassroots movement that paradoxically came to fruition from the top down: exploit commodity technology to simplify management of global software development. Global IT organizations thirsted for cheaper, simpler alternatives to proprietary household names like ClearCase, PVCS, or ChangeMan, and Subversion provided it. Building atop Subversion, CollabNet developed a planning system that coordinated source code check in, testing, builds and releases. CollabNet Enterprise and its current incarnation TeamForge capitalized on such demand from large global IT organizations, while overlooking what was happening at ground level, within isolated enclaves across its client base. Instead, Rally, joined by niche players like VersionOne and Danube, focused on the planning needs of development teams that embraced agile development methodologies. More recently, household names like IBM Rational, HP, Serena – and yes, CollabNet – hopped that bandwagon, exclaiming, “We’re agile!”
But Danube provides the lighter weight planning capability that CollabNet was missing. The acquisition that is being announced today plugs a gaping hole in CollabNet’s catalog. In the short term, CollabNet will link Danube’s (which will lose the company name) ScrumWorks product (whose brand name will survive) by enabling defect reports and commits tracked in TeamForge to update ScrumWorks. But both products will still be driven by separate back end repositories.
CollabNet can be excused for not having a full product integration roadmap, but at some point it is going to have to bite the bullet with ScrumWorks. While offerings from powers-that-be like IBM or Micro Focus (which inherited the Borland catalog and what was left of Compuware developer products) are not driven by a single engine, the CollabNet portfolio is not so diverse and complex to make that argument. Furthermore, acquisition of Danube has placed CollabNet up against Rally and Serena, which provide unified, broader suites (for Rally, minus source code control) that includes a key piece that is underrepresented in the combined TeamForge/ScrumWorks portfolio: requirements management. Scrumworks has some limited uer story management capabilities. Now that it has bitten off on agile, CollabNet needs to also make a serious stab for upgrading requirements capabilities.
It’s not like product convergence is foreign to CollabNet; last year it completed a more ambitious migration following the 2007 acquisition of SourceForge. It was hardly a straightforward process: product convergence meant migrating to the more modern, scalable architecture of the acquired product. It took 18 months, and after that point, the products were only about 75% integrated. But it did migrate the core base. The transition should not be so painful with ScrumWorks – you can use a common data engine but just selectively expose it through a lighter weight process skin.