Blueprint - Continous Requirements

Currently agile methodologies for software development are seeing an increased adoption in a variety of  business and organizations. one of the challenges bigger companies is face is how quickly they can turn around products for customers so that they can gain competitive advantage. One of the selling points for agile is that you need to have minimal documentation. As organizations mature through the agile process they are also finding that there is a lack of lineage on what was asked or needed as part of features. So there is a compelling need to track requirements and manage them effectively through the agile process. This is where a tool like Blueprint comes in, this tool is being widely used by some of the top 500 fortune companies.
Blueprint provides a very good mechanism to manage requirements and track requirements in a continuous fashion. The tool provides a very easy to use interface where one can maintain folder structures for a product.  The product folder is broken down into the following categories:
1. There is a folder to maintain current state of the product. This would contain the various components of a product, there can be broken down into different sub folders. Within each sub-folder you can maintain what blueprint calls artifacts. Artifacts could be a word doc, visio diagram, user inter face mock ups, Used cases and Test scripts/
2. There is a folder called Product management which is used for current requirements being worked on for the product.
3. There is a folder called Enterprise where is artifacts related to standards, compliance, regulations can be maintained.
4. There is a folder called archive, where in artifacts can be archived ans stored.
Blueprint requirements software link:
http://www.blueprintsys.com/

Blueprint also provides integration with other applications. The most important with respect to agile is the integration with a tool called  Rally. The one artifact inn Blueprint can be used for integration with Rally is called Process Story Teller. When Process story teller artifact is added in Blueprint, it provides an interface into a tool called Blueprint Storyteller. In Blueprint Storyteller, one can create process flow with decision points. Once the process flow is completed, these can be published into Blueprint and later be used for Integration with Rally.
Blueprint Storyteller:
http://www.blueprintsys.com/storyteller/ 

Please see image below for how the storyteller interface looks...



Rally Software Link:
https://rally1.rallydev.com/slm/login.op

Alteryx - Self-Service Data Analytics

There has been a lot of debate about ETL, how does it stack up with recent advancement in Big data technologies. One of the question being discussed how data can be ingested and how quickly can it be made relevant to the business. For many analysts in line of business  the process to blend and analyze data is slow and painful. It requires different tools and people to gather, cleanse data from different sources, lot of tools to build and publish analytic models. One of the products that handles this challenge is Alteryx. The product offers different capabilities: Prepare & Blend, Predictive Analytics, Spatial Analytics and Publish Insights.
Here is the link for one of their products:
http://www.alteryx.com/products/alteryx-designer

Quoting Alteryx: Alteryx Designer solves this by delivering a repeatable workflow for self-service data analytics that leads to deeper insights in hours, not the weeks typical of traditional approaches.
Please refer to the link to gain more insights into the Product Capabilities.