On-demand and just-in-time coaching will extend Agile best practices across the enterprise

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — A new partnership announced today between application lifecycle management (ALM) leader Serena Software and Valtech, a global provider of strategic software consulting, lean and agile-focused software engineering, skills training and coaching, promises to usher in a new era of Agile software development in the enterprise. Building on its commitment to support the exponential growth of Agile in the enterprise, Serena is combining its enterprise IT tool-making expertise with Valtech's transformation, coaching & education techniques to help corporate employees make use of Agile processes quickly and on-demand, without extensive prior training.

Agile is an iterative software development methodology that promotes team collaboration and adaptability throughout a project lifecycle. It's faster and more responsive than the traditional waterfall model, which takes a purely sequential approach to creating software. As a result, Agile developers deliver software that more closely matches actual customer needs more quickly, since "user stories" replace "specs" in the application development process.

"Agile development methodologies are seeing tremendous adoption in ISVs and IT departments of all sizes," said Jeremy Burton, CEO of Serena. "We are committed to delivering a pure-Agile toolset via SaaS later this year and are delighted to have Valtech as our partner of choice as we roll that toolset out to market."

Attendees of the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto will be able to experience the new partnership firsthand at the "Agile Story Corps Booth," where conference goers can record personal stories about their Agile experiences. These stories will influence support for Agile in Serena products and services. An extension of the Agile methods Serena uses to develop products, Agile Story Corps is a way to incorporate users as a part of the development team. This allows Serena products to better meet the needs of its users.

"Valtech enables organizations to leapfrog the endemic challenges that early Agile and Lean adopters have encountered when attempting to catalyze strategic organizational and personal change within the software and product development lifecycle. A focus on developer adoption without an equal focus on corporate and business alignment has consistently proved ineffective," said Brad Murphy, CEO of Valtech North America.

"Valtech's OnDemand Learning, Training and Organizational change programs identify only those Agile and Lean outcomes that organizations can and should adopt--and do so in ways that lead to quick wins crucial to winning support for sustaining the outcomes that Agile and Lean can provide," Murphy said. "Together, Serena and Valtech will ensure that business stakeholders, product owners and engineering teams can all equally succeed at acquiring the skill and value that Agile tools and best practices offer across the entire software and product development team while moving quickly to adoption and showing a compelling business return.

Serena and Valtech jointly will support Serena Agile development tools with training and documentation delivered in a variety of flexible formats, including:

• On Demand: tools and process training for individuals over the Web through the Serena community at http://community.serena.com;
• Just in time: 10-minute task-specific training for individuals to help beef up skills before taking a specific step; and
• Traditional training: available as needed.

About Valtech
Valtech is a global provider of high performance enterprise software development, outsourcing, and organizational transformation services. Valtech offers strategic software consulting, lean and agile-focused software engineering, skills training and coaching. The company partners with customers as no development company dares to, by sharing the risk and return of development. Valtech's OnDemand services are focused on one single outcome: Delivering business agility. Serving customers across a variety of industries, including finance, travel, energy, media, high-tech and online, Valtech OnDemand offerings result in priority business ideas and products converted to working, tested and deployable software every two weeks. Headquartered in Dallas, Valtech North America is a leading member of the Agile Alliance and Agile Project Leadership Network. For more information, please visit www.valtech.us.

About Serena Software, Inc.
Serena is a privately owned company, headquartered in Redwood City, California, with 29 offices in 14 countries and almost 1,000 employees. Serena provides software on premise and on demand to over 15,000 customers including 96 of the Fortune 100. Serena enables teams of programmers to become more efficient by standardizing and automating development processes across both mainframe and distributed environments. Serena enables IT business analysts and power users to improve productivity with a new generation of Web 2.0 tools to build Business Mashups. Business Mashups automate common, everyday processes, are visual and do not require coding. Serena also enables IT executives to gain visibility into their projects, resources and costs - CIO's should have access to the same quality of information about IT as the CFO has about Finance. For more information on Serena, visit www.serena.com.

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