Test Common meets with Rally Software

Thanks to Dan Forman, Rally's very capable Director of Partners and Alliances, the Test Common team was able to sit down today with Ryan Martens and Zach Nies. Ryan is the founder and CTO of the company. Before founding Rally Software Development - his fourth software start-up - Ryan directed the corporate adoption of Internet technologies within Qwest Communications, and then moved on to co-found Avitek, a Boulder-based custom software firm. Ryan's successful efforts at Avitek culminated in an acquisition by BEA Systems in 1999. At BEA, Ryan served as Director of Product Management for the eCommerce applications division where he grew the division to more than $50 million in revenue within its first twelve months. In 2006, Ryan was named as a semi-finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year award.

He was joined by Zach Niles, Rally's VP of Product development. Prior to Rally, Zach served as Principal Architect for Level 3 Communications and founded a small start up which was acquired by Creo, now a division of Kodak. He also served as Chief Software Architect at Quark. Zach's products have has won numberous awards, including Jolt Product Excellence awards, Seybold HotPicks and the MacWorld Best of Show.

Despite the extensive business experience of everyone sitting around the table most of the conversation revolved around engineering and challenges of development in an increasingly agile world. As the Chinese blessing would have it "may you live in interesting times" we in software are certainly living in interesting times. Both traditional development and test are poised to change in unexpected ways and Rally Software acts in many respects as the thin end of the wedge. It was a privilege to hear a little about how they plan to do it.