This week we announced that ProtoTest has become a solution partner with Rally Software Development Corp., a leader in the agile development tools market.  Rally made the announcement as part of their participation in the Agile 2006 Conference.  Rally supplies a complete Agile Lifecycle Management solution that supports agile teams with:

• Release and iteration planning, scheduling and tracking
• Real-time dashboards of project status and team velocity
• Customer-centric requirements management
• Early testing and test management
• Defect and issue management
• Collaboration and communication

ProtoTest will be providing consulting to Rally users in support of build and test automation. 

We believe that the agile approach to software development has very favorable implications for software quality.  Things like test-driven development (writing unit tests before coding), short iterations with little or no testing backlog, documented requirements in the form of user stories, and heavy user involvement in the dev process all tend to drive toward a higher-quality product.

Many organizations, when they implement agile, bump into challenges with being able to build and test quickly enough to keep pace with development ("velocity").  That's were we come in... we can help with strategies and tools for automating both the build/deploy step and the testing (unit and functional) to keep the pace up without incurring testing backlog or "debt."

For more info, check out www.agilealliance.org and www.rallydev.com.