How many times in our environment do we find the developers not following the right processes? Sometimes it creates serious issues, affects the software quality, adds to team frustration etc.
So beside designing and developing development processes it is equally important to ensure they processes have been adopted and practised regularly. There are few tools available that let you enforce the processes in your environment. The objective of these tools is too provide one window solution where team members can collaborate and follow the (customisable ) life cycle model, project managers can manage, developer and tester can work together, and that can be used as a central repository of the documents etc.
1. RallyDev http://www.rallydev.com/
A very nice tool, offers ajax enabled dashboard/interface to plan and monitor releases and iteration, allows you to follow either some Agile or RUP development methodology and automatically fetches the unit test results (coming from some automated unit testing tool). a demo can be viewed on http://www.rallydev.com/Rally_14_logofix.html
2. Collabnet : http://www.collab.net/products/enterprise_edition/.
Free for 15 users, claims to have more than 1 million users and they have recently acquired sourceforge. It primarily targets the companies with team members located at different geographical locations but of course it can be used for a consulting or internal IT environment where multiple projects run in parallel. You can check their live demos on their web site
3. VisionOne: http://www.versionone.com/
Another product similar to RallyDev but interface is not that impressive. check the demo here
http://www.versionone.com/flashtour/VersionOne_Product_Tour.htm. Also they offer a tool they call 'AgileToolEvaluator' which basically is a checklist of the items you should be looking for in an Agile tool. though it is good but again it is from versionone so the checklist lists the items that versionone tool supports. So you can use it but also consider your environment specific requirements.
There is another buyer's guide from 'Forrester' which costs US$279 and help you in identifying your requirements and what you can find out of the tools available. find it there http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,34977,00.html
There is another good article http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/What_the_agile_toolbox_contains
One more tool, available for free, but for those who are following XP. http://xplanner.org/
Next time (or sometime in future) I will talk about independent tools and utilities and how those could be used in a combination to follow some agile process.
