One of the hottest topics in software development today is the focus on combining agile and ALM.  Two terms that were once thought to be at odds.  ALM, or Application Lifecycle Management, traditionally focused on heavy processes and waterfall development while agile methods strove to rid the developers of the chains brought on by rigid process.  Todd Olson, Director of Product Marketing for Rally Software, joins Agile Journal publisher, Patrick Egan, in this episode of Agile Talk.

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Patrick and Todd chat about agile ALM and what's behind the market push to support this new combination.  Todd believes that the deep integration and adaptability of the Rally platform gives developers a seemless adoption of new capabilities while still preserving investment in legacy systems.  They go on to discuss the new features of the recent release of Rally's agile ALM tool as well as the future of this exciting integration.

Patrick Egan, Publisher of the Agile Journal talked with Robert Holler, CEO of VersionOne about their Summer Release which features enhanced product roadmapping, project workspaces and a new Salesforce.com integration, CaseConnect. You can view this video to hear the entire interview.

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During this interview, Robert talked about how excited he and his organization are about Agile 2010 and the trends that they have seen in the industry this year including the strategic adoption of agile within organizations. Robert discussed that VersionOne’s latest product features were developed based on these trends and customer feedback.  In particular, this year, some of their product enhancements include enhanced roadmapping facilities to align delivery and strategy, a project workspace so that teams can adapt the system to their own particular needs but still allow rollup and reporting capabilities across the organization, an integration with Salesforce and enhanced customer reporting and analytics.

CollabNet a leader in agile application lifecycle management has acquired Danube, the worldwide leader in Scrum project management solutions and developer of ScrumWorks Pro. In an interview with Patrick Egan, CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli and Danube CTO Victor Szalvay discuss the acquisition. Overall it seems like this acquisition is a net benefit for Agile and ALM which at times seem to be at odds.

During the interview Bill Portelli talked about what CollabNet found most attractive about Danube and the strategic thinking behind the deal? Since ScrumWorks Pro is a SCRUM project management tool, we were also interested if this acquisition indicated that CollabNet will now have a special focus on Scrum as opposed to other Agile methods?

From Danube's point of view Victor Szalvay talks about how the combination of CollabNet TeamForge provides a safe and easy transition for companies moving to agile. We also talked about what ScrumWorks customers can customers can expect to see in the future.

We wrapped up the interview with a discussion by Bill Portelli on the future of the three product lines, CollabNet TeamForge, CollabNet Subversion, and ScrumWorks  as both stand-alone products and as an integrated suite.

For more information about this release you can visit the CollabNet website at www.collab.net