One month to go for the SoftALM launch!

Here at JamBuster, we are very exhilarated as we are speeding towards the commercial release! It has been a month since we launched the Beta version of SoftALM.

By 2011, we had commercialized our in-house project portfolio management tool GDE. By 2013, we were looking for an affordable tool to integrated management of requirements, test cases and defects. When we could not, we saw it as an opportunity to build on our in-house tool these ALM capabilities. Our outsourcing development experience, research on available tools and customer feedbacks on GDE tool, helped us get clarity on what features an ALM tool should essentially have. We named our ALM tool – ‘SoftALM’ for software application lifecycle management.

The Agile methodology, over this time, became a ‘go-to’ strategy for majority of project teams around the globe. For our team. journey of transforming to be truly Agile began 8 months ago. Our team was quick to jump the “Agile” train, as the Agile methodology coincided with our set of principles and practices. Agile practice brought a sense of ownership and empowerment to each team member through interactions to get things ‘Done’! As believers in early involvement of customer, we started talking to them early and got their feedback through alpha and beta candidates. So now we appreciate why Agile philosophy recommends short release cycles. Of course, with our team becoming Agile, SoftALM which started as an ALM tool, quickly turned into an agile ALM tool.

Thus, adopting agile principles was not the most difficult task. Whereas, developing an ALM tool with Agile principles incorporated in it, required some serious analysis, constant conversations with customers and of course, hard-work! Our team and SoftALM have evolved over four internal iterations of software over the past 8 months. After incorporating beta feedback, we are a month away from commercial release slated in early January!

This experience has helped us develop a keen understanding of how to transform to agile especially when years are spent following Waterfall practices. We incorporated all the learnings in SoftALM! Thus SoftALM accommodates both methodologies and takes you through the Agile transformation in a painless way. We endeavor to stand by you through this transformation and make SoftALM your tool to win over agile!

Trying a Free Demo of this software would be a great way to see it yourself: Check it out!

From where does Agile gets its Agility?

While we have been dilly dallying moving to agile practices over last few years, early this year we decided that our small product team needs to be fully agile over next 6 months. The last 8 months of transformation has helped us all see whether Agile is as agile as it is made out! We saw 40-50% increase in team velocity over waterfall for the same team!

Waterfall focuses on a release that spans across define, design, develop and verify to develop multiple features in an almost assembly line manner. Agile divides the features into user stories (as if sub-feature) and each of these user stories is defined, designed, developed and verified within one or more iterations by a dedicated scrum team. We discovered that this difference between waterfall and agile manifests to accelerate velocity through following three sources:


A Scrum team is functionally complete team that focuses on a few user stories and works towards their completion or achieving the ‘Definition of DONE’ during an iteration or few. For this team, any question that stands as an impediment to DONE becomes a high priority task, not a to-do list item. A dedicated, complete team focused on user story means it gets a detail attention for UI, development, quality and integration, thus reducing rework (which is common when large teams work on large sized efforts).

Thus a focused, dedicated scrum team is the heart and soul that ensures agility of Agile and therefore the first source!

In Agile, the user stories get fully developed and delivered in iterations, while in waterfall, we had to wait until multiple iterations are rolled in a release to have a single feature delivered. Thus agile scales down its focus from features to take an ‘a la carte’ approach of developing user story. This focus on user stories as opposed to feature, adds to project agility as the second source.

Those poor souls harassed by ghost of waterfall projects know well that it is the rework at the end that really burst the project deadlines. The incremental approach of agile provides the opportunity for early customer reviews and hence early inclusion of change requests and early rework, thereby keeping ghost of rework in-check! We also saw, that early feedback seems to invigorate teams to get it DONE and serves as the third source of agility!

Thus, the agility comes from dedicated scrum teams, focus on user stories and less rework due to early feedback! This of course starts from team attitude! Attitude of scrum team to get stories DONE with high velocity and superior quality, with a healthy attitude towards feedback!

Discovering Agile Application Lifecycle Management

When I was researching Agile Application Lifecycle Management, I realized that there is no standard definition of it. About 80 to 100 vendors offer 500+, what they call “Agile ALM solutions or part of their ALM offerings”. Most of these offerings differed from each other in terms of their focus and what they thought an ALM should be like! Some focused on Product and Project Management, others on Software Development and Delivery.

Few of the prominent ones focused on providing a solution that could speedup quality delivery but missed out on an important part of ALM which was Customer Support! For Example: HP’s ALM solution leverages its niche ‘Quality Center’, Atlassian’s focus being ‘Defect Management’, Microsoft combines VS’s ‘Code Development’ with TFS and SmartBear built their ALM complete by combining DevComplete and QAComplete.

And we, being a Agile software product company realized that it isn’t really possible to stay ahead of the game if you are lacking in product support! That’s when Team JamBuster, having an experience of managing 100 + outsourcing projects worldwide, realized the need for a truly end-to-end solution for the market of Software App Lifecycle Development which would change the market dynamics. 

We observe from our vantage point that vendors get the software firms to make a quilt or patchwork of their applications that would help manage the App Lifecycle. This complex juggling between tools makes it even more difficult to collaborate and deliver projects before deadlines.

We are launching SoftALM™ to bring the focus on Agile ALM, instead of having to maintain and integrate a bunch of software to manage your ALM! Just have one software doing it for you at one fourth the cost! Achieve an Integrated Management of Product, Project, Software, Quality and Support all on a single platform. 

Sounds good??

Contact us at info@jambuster.in to get a Free Demo on your computer or smartphone and experience how SoftALM ™ works its magic on your App Development Lifecycle!