This app aims to help improve software project success!

LONDON, UK: Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) today announced the launch of the Alpha State Explorer App for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. The app, which is freely available on the App Store, enables software development teams to easily track their project status, set clear objectives and avoid failures by ensuring essential aspects of good software development practice are addressed.

The app is entirely method, process and practice agnostic, and supports any type of software development, whether teams are using traditional methods, or more modern lean and agile techniques, said a press release.

"The Alpha State Explorer app is a new offering, but the concepts it embodies have been proven over many years within our customer engagements, across many different types of project, and within a variety of industries." said Sion Roberts, IJI CEO.

"The concept is simple: if check-lists can keep aircraft in the sky, and save patient's lives in the operating theatre, then why not do the same for software projects? The check-lists built in to the Alpha State Explorer app are the result of decades of collective experience, from a multitude of software professionals around the world."

The app supports the lightweight process framework known as The Essence Kernel, originally developed by the SEMAT group and in the process of becoming an industry standard under the OMG.

IJI Chairman and CTO Ivar Jacobson, commented: "The problem with traditional software processes is that they are too large and cumbersome for most development projects, and tailoring them down is often too complex a task. Agile has addressed this to some degree, focusing on the people aspects of development and minimizing process overhead. But in order to successfully scale up, and get the right balance of agility and governance, we need an ultra-lightweight, adaptable process framework, one that can work with any project - The Essence Kernel is such a framework, and the app is the latest offering to support it and make it widely available to the software development industry."