Broadcom today at the VMware Explore 2024 conference added an on-premises edition of its Rally project management application for managing software engineering projects.
Jean-Louis Vignaud, head of ValueOps for the Agile Operations Division of Broadcom, said Rally Anywhere provides DevOps Teams with an alternative to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of the platform that gives them more control over how their data is stored.
That’s a critical option for organizations operating in heavily regulated industries or any organization that is concerned about ransomware attacks that are increasingly being aimed at providers of SaaS applications, he added.
Broadcom is also looking to provide an alternative option to organizations that have been told that a rival on-premises edition of the Jira project management application from Atlassian will soon no longer be made available, noted Vignaud.
Finally, Rally Anywhere will also enable organizations to comply with any data sovereignty requirement that requires them to ensure data is stored within the physical borders of a specific country, he noted.
Rally is part of a portfolio of ValueOps value stream management (VSM) tools that Broadcom provides in both SaaS and on-premises editions. VSM traces its lineage back to lean manufacturing methods, which call for each step of a manufacturing process to be continuously measured. As software development has evolved from being a craft to a process that is automated as much as possible using DevOps best practices, an appreciation for the value of monitoring issues such as the impact of missed software development deadlines on the business has grown steadily, especially as more organizations realize how dependent on software they have become to drive revenue.
The overall goal is to make it possible to analyze normalized data collected from a diverse range of applications and services in a way that can also be more easily shared with applications such as Clarity, a workflow management application from Broadcom that is designed for business users, said Vignaud. That integration provides the business users regardless of what industry segment they operate in the visibility needed to manage an organization like a software company, he added.
It’s not clear how many software engineering teams might be looking to replace their existing approach to managing software engineering projects, but as it becomes simpler to automatically collect data from DevOps tools and platforms it’s becoming much easier to manage these projects. The days when project managers need to enter data they manually collected from software engineers have all but come to a close. Most of the data collection process has now been automated by modern project management applications.
The challenge now is applying artificial intelligence (AI) to that data to make it simpler to identify potential bottlenecks in software engineering workflows that might conspire to delay the development of an application. It may be still a while before those types of AI capabilities become pervasively employed but the one certain thing is that as project management continues to evolve many of the rote tasks that once made the job of the project manager tedious are rapidly being eliminated.