Collaboration between teams and how to scale agile across the enterprise were among the topics discussed at the Agile Alliance’s Agile2013 conference, held this week in Nashville.

In an interview with SD Times, Andy Powell, customer evangelist at VersionOne, commented on this agile buzz heard at the show. “Scrum did a good job of training a lot of people on the essential conversations for team-level agile,” he said. “And now, as they’re starting to scale, they need some more instructions around to do their planning and also some guidance on how to collaborate with each other.”

At the show, VersionOne launched its eighth annual State of Agile Development Survey, whose goal every year is to provide insight into the latest agile development trends and practices. The survey will be available to take on the company’s website through the end of September.

The conference’s three keynote speeches were given by Abhi Nemani, the interim co-executive director at Code for America; Tim Lister, principal at the Atlantic Systems Guild; and Gene Kim, author of  “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win.”

How governments are adopting modern practices to reduce costs and improve services to their constituencies was among the topics discussed in Nemani’s opening keynote.
During his keynote, Tim Lister described how team dynamics have changed over the last 40 years and how they bring new challenges today to workplace collaboration.
In his keynote, Gene Kim presented his findings from an ongoing study of how high-performing IT organizations simultaneously deliver stellar service levels while delivering a fast flow of new features into the production environment. #!

Axosoft announced a new OnTime Enterprise edition of its solution that includes five OnTime modules, plus support and remote setup and training. The five OnTime modules include OnTime Scrum, OnTime Help Desk, OnTime Team Wiki, OnTime University and OnTime Bug Tracker. The company also announced the OnTime App ecosystem. Users can get third-party and Axosoft-built add-ons to extend and integrate the capabilities of OnTime for their dev and support teams. Axosoft also announced a new JIRA-to-Ontime Migration and Import tool, which uses APIs to pull and push users’ data between systems.

Blueprint announced Blueprint for Enterprise Agile Requirements, techniques for enterprises undertaking large, complex and often distributed development projects. Their techniques are compatible with and do not presume any particular Agile development approach (e.g., Scrum, Extreme Programming, Feature Driven Development, Kanban).
Hansoft announced that the newly released Hansoft-Git integration is now live. The integration allows users to link Git commits with items in Hansoft. The integration is bi-directional and allows users to tag Git commits on submission or after the commit has been made. A free, nine-user trial of Hansoft can be downloaded from the company website.

Lean-Kanban University, a coaching and training organization, announced its upcoming Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) Master classes. The organization also announced new LKU “Train the Trainer” courses to prepare coaches and consultants to become LKU Accredited Kanban Trainers. These courses will qualify trainers to teach LKU Certified Kanban Training in a public class or private organization.

LeanKit, a visual collaboration platform for project and portfolio management, announced LeanKit Forecasting and Risk Management, a new forecasting tool that lets project managers harvest historical project data to predict delivery dates for projects.

LogiGear announced an expanded suite of testing tools — TestArchitect Professional, Mobile Plus, and Enterprise. TestArchitect Professional is a test automation solution for testing Windows-based applications; TestArchitect Mobile Plus offers Windows-based application testing plus mobile testing; and TestArchitect Enterprise offers customizable Windows, Web, cloud and mobile testing capability.

Red Gate announced that there are new application development best practices accessible through database delivery with its tools.

Scrum.org announced the availability of the Professional Scrum Developer I (PSD I) assessment, which measures knowledge of how to build complex software using Scrum. Show attendees received 50 percent off for the assessment for this industry-recognized certification.

Serena Software announced a new partnership with Tasktop Technologies in which Tasktop will develop, and Serena will offer, OEM versions of Tasktop Dev and Tasktop Sync for Serena Business Manager (SBM), which the company said acts as the process foundation underpinning Serena’s orchestrated ALM solutions. Tasktop also announced Tasktop Sync 2.8. The company said this new version of Tasktop Sync automates how time-tracking data, recorded in the practitioner’s development tools, is synchronized with the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) products used by the Program Management Office PMO.

Opscode and CollabNet announced new collaboration based on a number of successful joint-customer engagements. The companies said the new initiatives include CollabNet implementation services that support an integrated TeamForge ALM and Chef IT automation offering for Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps, and TeamForge Recipes and Cookbooks for Chef.

Rally Software unveiled initial findings from an agile software development practices study that it conducted with Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI). The study analyzed non-attributable data from 9,629 teams using Rally’s Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform. More information can be found on Rally’s website.  Rally also announced that its new book, Agile Business: A Leader’s Guide to Harnessing Complexity achieved bestseller status on Amazon’s Software Development list and on its Business Workflow Software list.

The Scrum Alliance announced the availability of a new report, “The State of Scrum: Benchmarks & Guidelines.” Five hundred professionals in more than 70 countries were surveyed for the report, which reveals who is practicing Scrum, why they are practicing Scrum and the outlook for Scrum.

VersionOne introduced PlanningRooms and Conversations+ (pronounced Conversations Plus) as part of its Summer 2013 Release. The two new features aim to simplify collaboration with external stakeholders and program managers. The company said PlanningRooms and Conversations+ remove everyday communication barriers and provide an open space where stakeholders can make good decisions quickly at the program level.