Margo Visitacion

The announcement that Planview has entered into an agreement to acquire Tasktop marks a new milestone in the evolution and maturity of the value stream management (VSM) solutions market. This acquisition brings together two companies with very complementary strengths: Planview provides lean portfolio management, capacity, and financial management, and Tasktop provides value stream management and […]

Transitioning to a future fit technology strategy can increase the value your technology organization delivers. Find out how in this blog post.

Learn how the pandemic's increased uncertainty and volatility has produced some attractive M&A opportunities in DevOps and IT Management.

Now is not the time to revert back to old industrial practices. The world is going even more digital because of the COVID-19 crisis, and old industrial era thinking needs to be abandoned once and for all.

I’m very excited to be teaming up with Margo Visitacion on the biennial Forrester State of Agile At Scale Survey. This year, we’ve added a few more questions in areas that we see organizations struggle. In addition to successful Agile team practices and alignment with business stakeholders upstream and downstream with testing/operations, we are now […]

We’ve been researching a central dilemma for software leaders over the last year: If software is so important to digital business and customer engagement, why isn’t software development better understood by the C-suite? To foster an environment of fast and valuable software development, CEOs must be in the driver’s seat; they must master software as […]

What Our Clients Tell Us All The Time . . . “Our organization has gone to great lengths to become Agile, and we are well on our journey, but there is friction between our org and those within the company who have not yet transitioned to Agile practices.” Agile teams feel bogged down and relevant […]

I’ve lived in my house for a long time and it’s time for a refresh. Over the last several months, I planned what needed significant investment and what only needed a cosmetic update. A couple of things were evident: new windows, for one. I was confident that the rest could be handled with some spackle […]

CSC announced today that it is acquiring AppLabs, a US-based IV&V testing vendor. At first glance, it's a win, maybe a win for both sides. CSC states that one of the reasons that it acquired AppLabs is to augment its horizontal application strategy – due to AppLabs' presence in the US and UK (both vendors have firmly rooted practices in […]

Gaining visibility into the big picture of an IT portfolio feels like one of the unsolvable challenges, and it’s not for lack of trying. Dashboards abound, and PPM tools are becoming more user friendly all the time, but do these tools really provide transparency into what’s really going on? Sometimes I think these tools provide MORE […]

On July 27, 2010, Parallax Capital Partners announced that it was acquiring Daptiv, a SaaS PPM vendor. Forrester customers who are current Daptiv customers or are considering Daptiv as a PPM vendor should not be deterred. As a $20 million vendor, Daptiv provided a strong work group for project portfolio management, performing well at the […]

Deltek’s announcement today of its intent to acquire Maconomy has the potential to vault the vendor’s position as a potential leader in the project-based solutions (PBS) space. For midmarket organizations that deliver projects as a crucial part of their revenue generation, this is a good move. While the focuses of the products share slight overlaps, […]

Recently, I’ve been getting more inquiries around risk based testing.   In addition to agile test methods and test estimation, test teams turning their eyes to risk based testing is just another positive step in integrating quality through out the SDLC.  Yes, I still see QA engineers as having to put their evangelist hats on to […]

I've been working quite closely with fellow analysts Dave West and Mary Gerush surrounding project estimation. Regardless if you're in the Agile world, testing is factored in (well, unit testing anyway), and if you're in the traditional camp, we've heard the same pain from a number of Forrester customers. No matter what methodology we use, […]

A common inquiry request to Forrester is asking for benchmarks for quality.  Testing groups are struggling to figure out how well they’re doing and if the processes they’re fighting for are making a difference.   QA value can be hard to define and to prove if development and project teams don’t regularly collect metrics to measure productivity […]

As teams become more agile, or, add more agile like practices to traditional development practices, I’m seeing increasing frustration on the part of test managers.  Rapid development cycles and scrutinized bottom lines are putting more pressure on them to deliver comprehensive testing in tighter time frames.  More and more testing is being taken on by development teams, and while […]