Time will tell whether Agile will prove to be a decent and worthwhile alternative for waterfall. This is an ongoing debate between the 2 camps that doesn’t look it’s about to end any soon.

In reality, you don’t get easy-to-implement changes during dev, you get the equivalent of:

“Can we make the next two floors entirely aquariums?”

“Can we make the next floor have 10x the square footage, and the one after that needs to be round and half the size of the others.”

Etc… analogies like this simply do not make sense.

My thoughts are that the problem doesn’t lie with the process or method. It lies with the team.

With the agile method you need a very good team of programmers that can write clean code in a flash. What if you have someone that is new to your team and hasn’t done a lot of programming?

I think that its really not a big priority which method is being used. But the importance is that you have a good team that can do the work fast and good. Thats why I’m just not that impressed with the agile method (yet).

Salesforce.com does not run their software on Google technology. And the rest of what you stated about Salesforce.com is all wrong.

Outsourcing is a separate issue to offshore, and seems be increasing driven by limited management bandwidth than cost (i.e. there’s a limited number of balls we can keep in the air at one time, so one option is to get someone else to juggle some of our balls for us.).

r.

PEG

2) I visited Rally when I was in Boulder, CO 2 years ago. I talked to Ryan and other guys on his team. They develop their software same way as they market it to others. That is fair.

3) In java world, for instance, they choose different dev environments: eclipse, netbeans, idea etc. And there’s always huge amount of inspired proponents of each, ready to participate in long-long religious debates. But that’s life. So people use Rally, others use MSP etc-etc.

I think agile and live agile and my team does too. I respect everyone who opposes it either, because they give my team and other teams like mine a competitive advantage. Every opinion should be respected!

To all the haters: regardless of what you think about agile or Rally, I knew Ryan when it was nothing more than a PowerPoint deck. The amazing thing is, the fundamental business model has not changed since then. He and Tim knew from the get-go what they wanted to build and who would buy it. That’s extremely rare for a startup.

Our largest customers have 1000’s of developers spread around the world coordinated in 100’s of small 10 person teams producing some very large and mission critical software systems. The Enterprise product is built to manage the requirements backlog prioritization process, program status roll-up, the system acceptance testing and the integration into other software tools in the process including developer IDE’s, build systems, case management and automated acceptance testing. The Community Edition is built for small teams just getting started and does not include the quality, integration or large scale program management capabilities that may have been more that you were looking for.