- Moody's KMV implemented Rally's Agile lifecycle management solutions to provide a single source for tracking development projects across the organization, replacing spreadsheets and separate tools. - Rally provided real-time visibility into projects through linked user stories, tasks, defects and other items. It supported Agile practices at an enterprise scale. - Moody's saw significantly faster development times using Rally - a project that previously took 2-3 years was completed in 12 months, and productivity improved 47% over industry averages.

1. Scaling Software Agility
®
A Rally Customer Experience Report
Copyright © 2009 Rally Software Development Corp. All rights reserved.
www.rallydev.com
Rally provides Moody’s with Real-time
Visibility and Metrics to Measure Success
Moody's is an essential component of the global capital markets, providing
credit ratings, research, tools and analysis that contribute to transparent and
integrated financial markets. Moody's Corporation (NYSE: MCO) is the parent
company of Moody's Investors Service, which provides credit ratings and
research covering debt instruments and securities, and Moody's Analytics,
which encompasses the growing array of Moody's non-ratings businesses.
Moody’s Analytics includes Moody's KMV (MKMV), a provider of quantita-
tive credit analysis tools, Moody's Economy.com, a provider of economic research and data services,
and Moody's Wall Street Analytics, a provider of software for structured finance analytics.
Challenges
MKMV began to pilot Agile development practices after their CTO convinced the organiza-
tion that Agile was the best way to improve productivity and time-to-market for its prod-
ucts. To track their Agile initiatives, the company first tried to cobble together a mix of
tools including a traditional project management tool, wikis, and spreadsheets. However,
because the tools weren’t designed to reinforce Agile principles, the tracking process soon
became a significant drag on productivity.
In addition, there was no one place where Moody’s executives could get a view of all
development projects to know whether the company was meeting its commitments.
Spreadsheets were emailed around the company as a poor substitute to a single source of
reporting, and maintaining an organized development environment became increasingly
difficult. An off-shore development effort in China made it even more important to have a
central solution for tracking and reporting. One year after the pilot began, it had become
more apparent that a true Agile development tool was needed to support the development
process. Moody’s then began to search for a complete Agile solution to manage the diverse
development projects across the organization.
The Search for an Agile Solution
When the search for an Agile tool began, Moody’s first looked at using a collaboration
server, but found that it wasn’t structured in a way that allowed them to see the state of
projects and features. Although Moody’s considered building this functionality themselves,
they decided against it because of cost and the distraction it would cause the development
team away from their core projects. After a Forrester Research report brought Rally to their
attention, Moody’s downloaded free trials of both Rally and another tool vendor and
conducted a side-by-side feature comparison.
From its evaluation, Moody’s concluded that only Rally could support Agile at the
enterprise level with hundreds or even thousands of users.
Darren Stovel, Senior Director of Program Management, said, “When we were evaluating
Rally, we were really impressed with the fact that within the Rally solution, team members
could look at a newly requested feature and see everything related to that feature – user
stories, test cases, tasks, defects, notes, and discussions were all linked to the feature. We
especially liked that you could see a rollup of the story hierarchy, with tasks and test cases
all tied into the dashboard views.”
Moody’s was also impressed that Rally was completely open about its product roadmap,
particularly about features that Moody’s was looking for in the future.
Company and Industry
• Industry: Moody's KMV is a
provider of quantitative credit
analysis tools and a subsidiary
of Moody’s Corporation
Development Environment
• Two week iterations, with
releases every three months
• Develop in Java, C++, and .net
Challenges
• Mix of spreadsheets, wikis, and
traditional project tools was
difficult to maintain for the
development organization and
had a detrimental effect on
productivity
• No overview of the
development efforts across the
organization
Solution
• Implemented Rally’s Agile
lifecycle management
solutions, providing a single,
enterprise-wide overview of all
development projects across
the organization that was easy
to maintain and update
Results
• Four times faster
time-to-market as compared to
industry average
• Productivity for development
team 47% better than industry
average

2. Implementing Rally
Moody’s also chose Rally for its focus on an end-to-end solution for Agile success,
including training and community support. Through a series of on-site training with
coaches in the company’s various locations, Moody’s was able to get up-to-speed on
both best Agile practices and training on the Rally solution.
Darren explains, “One of the other driving factors behind our choosing Rally was their
extensive services organization. Having a Rally coach come on-site helped us really
leverage Agile practices and got us up and running on the Rally solution quickly.”
The rollout of the Rally solution began with one pilot team mostly tracking stories and
tasks. However, the use of Rally quickly spread across the organization because it was so
easy to use and standard dashboards provided instant visibility into progress and
roadblocks. Rally is now used across 13 projects for full Agile lifecycle management
across programs, including test and defect management.
Moody’s team members use Rally’s iteration status dashboard to update status during
their daily standup meetings, planning dashboards for drag-and-drop release and
iteration planning., and the team status dashboard to balance workload and identify
roadblocks. Team members use the iteration status dashboard throughout the day,
while ScrumMasters and others view the release status dashboard on a weekly basis to
ensure that development is on track. Moody’s teams also frequently use user story
backlog screens to prioritize upcoming development work.
In looking at future uses of Rally, the company plans to use Rally’s Integration Hub to
create custom dashboards and reports.
Seeing Results
Moody’s has moved from longer release cycles to a schedule where they are typically
releasing every three months, as a result of its increased productivity. And, the results of
Rally’s solutions are obvious in many areas of the organization.
Darren explains, “An Agile team took over the complete redesign of one of our most
successful desktop products, turning into a scalable enterprise solution. A project of that
scope would likely have taken two to three years using our older waterfall-style process;
we released version 1.0 of the redesigned product to the market in twelve months.”
About Rally
Rally is the leader in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) dedicated to making
leaner development organizations that respond faster to changing customer needs.
According to a study by QSM Associates, teams that rely on Rally’s Agile lifecycle
management products and services are 50% faster to market and 25% more productive
than industry averages. Rally’s products were honored with four consecutive Jolt Awards
(the software industry’s equivalent of the Oscar®
award) in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.
The company’s end-to-end solutions for Agile development also include Agile University,
the largest source for Agile training, and Agile Commons, the largest collaborative Web
2.0 community dedicated to advancing software agility.
www.rallydev.com
“A project of that scope
would likely have taken
two to three years using
our older waterfall-style
process; we released
version 1.0 of the
redesigned product in
twelve months.”
Darren Stovel
Senior Director of Program
Management
Scaling Software Agility
®
Rally Software
4001 Discovery Dr
Boulder, CO 80303
v 303 565 2800
e info@rallydev.com