Press

Sprintr brings social collaboration to project management, engaging employees, empowering stakeholders and enabling instant user feedback

BOSTON – May 31, 2011 – Mendix, the leading agile application platform-as-a-service company, today launches sprintr™, the first social collaboration space dedicated to assisting employees and project teams across the enterprise. Sprintr combines the best of social collaboration and project management tools to facilitate employee engagement and co-creation. Now in beta, project teams no longer have to cope with heavyweight, administrative project management tools.

Sprintr is simple and easy to use; signing-up takes less than 10-seconds using a corporate email address.  After joining, users can create projects, send invitations to fellow stakeholders and start a conversation. Project pages are furnished with a name, description and a logo, and members can stay up-to-date, share and discuss thoughts on a project page.

“Sprintr simplifies the collaboration process by breaking down traditional organizational boundaries,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix. “In most organizations, project teams are geographically dispersed, resulting in inefficient communication, adding complexity to any project. Sprintr eliminates this problem and facilitates true business collaboration online.”

Team members can also establish milestones within projects and use planning tools to manage them. As each milestone is added, completed or changed, team members are notified and kept up-to-date. Sprintr organizes thoughts and ideas so project teams don’t have to.

Faster Feedback, Forever

With sprintr, teams can organize end-user feedback and incorporate it directly into their planning. This user-driven functionality enables teams to get instant feedback and course-correct quickly, resulting in better business practices and happier customers.

For software teams, a feedback widget containing a simple pop-up form can be easily embedded in any website or web-based application. This widget enables teams to get instant user feedback on any application. Stakeholders can then evaluate the feedback, via a built-in voting mechanism and either reject it, put it on hold or add it to the project backlog.

Sprintr can be accessed at, http://www.sprintr.com.

This week, the British Government goes Agile, a net-map technique is explained for Agile teams, 10 characteristics are explained about what makes a good product owner, the difference between user cases and user stories is explained and Mr Appelo closes this week’s roundup with a quote every agile practitioner should take to heart.

The most interesting activity in the agile community of last week: Jurgen Appelo breaks down barriers, the supposed need for metrics in agile projects are explained and a lawyers’ vision on agility in the government and public sector causes a stir. This and more in this week’s Agile Community round up.

Scheduled webinar for Litco customers to highlight how to develop, deploy and manage custom business applications

BOSTON & ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – May 18, 2011 – Litco Systems Inc., a Canadian-based solutions provider specializing in custom web portals, announced today a new partnership with Mendix, the leading application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider. Litco Systems will introduce the Mendix Agile Business Platform™ to their customers via a joint webinar, scheduled for Thursday, May 26 from 1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EDT. To register for the joint webinar please click here.

With Mendix, Litco Systems will be able to develop, deploy and manage business applications faster than with traditional development tools. This complete management of the application lifecycle will inevitably result in shortened development cycles and lower overhead costs.

“By using Mendix’s application platform, we will be able to quickly react to the needs and requests of our customers, with zero hassle and a faster turnaround time,” said Lisa Banducci, Business Development. “We will use the introductory webinar to educate our customers on our partnership, as well as demonstrate the Mendix Agile Business Platform.

“Litco Systems has chosen the Mendix platform in order to fulfill the demanding application development needs of their existing diverse client-base,” said Mendix VP of Global Marketing, Paul Campaniello. “The joint webinar will also highlight a number of Mendix user case studies effectively demonstrating how the platform has been utilized to integrate and renew value in legacy systems.”

About Litco Systems Inc.

Litco Systems Inc. is a recognized expert in Document Process Automation, providing a comprehensive set of solutions including output management, business intelligence and web portal solutions.

Founded in 1987, Litco Systems Inc. is headquartered in Markham, north of Toronto, with offices in Vancouver and Montreal and is the Canadian authorized distributor for Bottomline & QlikTech Inc., software solutions. To learn more about Litco Systems please visit their website, http://www.litcosys.ca.

At Mendix we follow a lot of interesting people on twitter, but we realize not everybody has the time or patience to go through the daily plethora of blogs, tweets, LinkedIn discussions and videos about agility and software development. Luckily this is a part of our job, so from now on we will update you weekly about the best agile discussions out there (following up on Eric’s post).

What people managers can learn from parents.

Similar to the role of the parent, the agile manager is there to support the team’s development and make it successful and autonomous until one day – maybe – the team is highly performing and can become independent. Read More…

Self-organisation: it’s not a case of whether to, but making use of the fact it occurs

When self-organisation is on your side it can be extremely valuable. If you’re working in a complex adaptive system it’s shown that by far the most effective way to allow that system to operate is to allow it to self-organise, because that’s what it will naturally try to do. Read More…

Agile Requirements: Not an Oxymoron

“Agile requirements” isn’t an oxymoron, although it may be a bit of a paradox-in the same way that the concise enables the complex, the small gives rise to the large, incompleteness facilitates the finish, and you must slow down to speed up. Indeed, Agile requirements are central to Agile planning, development, and delivery. Read More…

Are You A Whole Team?

Whole-team approach — the agile practice in which the entire team works as a unit of generalizing specialists to share responsibility for producing high-quality software — is a kind of “glue” practice: It holds a lot of the other agile practices together. For example, whole-team approach is #1 on Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory’s list of “key success factors” for agile testing.

By uniting and supporting practices, it yields powerful benefits like lowering risk to delivery, improving velocity/cycle time, producing better ideas and reducing defects and other waste. Like other agile practices, though, whole-team approach requires discipline and diligence. So here are a four “smells” that might indicate that you’re not optimally practicing whole-team approach – as well as some possible remedies to help you overcome them. Read More…

Seven duties of a great software developer

Jurgen Appelo – Closing Keynote from ACE! Conference – Best Practices on Vimeo.

This is the first in a series of articles in which Albert Leenders (technical director at Transfer Solutions) and Bjorn de Visser (business developer at Mendix) will be discussing the potential of Mendix in an Oracle environment. They will do this by using a practical and current challenge in the Oracle application portfolio.

Oracle has announced that they are no longer developing and supporting Designer, Forms and Reports will remain. (Oracle Application Development Tools. Statement of Direction: Oracle Forms, Reports and Designer, july 2009). With Designer, a rich and mature environment ceases to exist. This development environment is particularly popular in The Netherlands, United Kingdom and Scandinavia. For a lot of organizations now the question arises: How do I make sure there is continuity for my apps that have been created with Designer?