Borland sets ALM rollout with three tools

Borland Software on Monday will deliver on its Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) strategy for assessing the progress of software development projects.

The company will unveil three products and a set of service packages leveraging the Open ALM bus technology, which gathers information from ALM tools from multiple vendors. These three tools are part of the company’s Borland Management Solutions (BMS) software delivery management platform that leverages Open ALM. BMS is intended to provide an ALM “cockpit” offering visibility and control over software development initiatives.

BMS is intended to save users from the pitfalls of software development projects in which projects can fail, go over budget, or miss milestones, said Rick Jackson, Borland chief marketing officer.

“Organizations are being challenged to improve their performance, but they can’t improve what they can’t track and measure. That’s the whole point of Borland Management Solutions [BMS],” Jackson said. Users, he said, have been beset with trying to manage a “black box,” without knowledge of how things are working and what progress is being made.

The three tools include:

— TeamDemand, providing a view into software demands coming into the software delivery organization. Business users can collaborate with IT to make decisions on projects. The product interfaces with ALM artifacts such as requirements, user stories, and tasks housed in existing tool repositories. A portal is provided to track software requests. The product serves as “Fedex-tracking for IT projects,” said Jackson.

— TeamFocus, for managing and monitoring the performance of software delivery providers. Multiple software development methodologies are supported including agile, waterfall, and iterative. Linking to practitioner tools, TeamFocus monitors day-to-day progress and includes dashboards with metrics to keep teams and management united in project efforts. Agile concepts are supported such as sprints, which are time increments, and burndown charts, which display how tasks are being accomplished.

—  TeamAnalytics, providing business intelligence on projects and featuring an enterprise data warehouse. Current and historic information is brought together and analyzed. Customizable dashboards assist in building predictable delivery models and improving processes.

The three tools are due to ship this fall, which is also when pricing will be announced. “The three products that make up Borland Management Solutions are management applications that sit on top of existing tools,” Jackson said.

BMS offerings are built on the Open ALM services framework that uses Internet-based technologies to connect Borland’s and other industry tools for project and portfolio management, requirements definition, and management, software configuration, change management and lifecycle quality management, Borland said. Tools can be connected to the framework via Web services.

Besides supporting Borland’s own ALM tools, the company’s plans call for linking with the former Mercury Interactive tools acquired by HP as well as with IBM Rational and Microsoft tools. Data will be gathered from these products. Borland has developed a connector ecosystem, featuring an Open Connector SDK to support other ALM tools and custom tools.

Borland’s plan drew a generally favorable response from analyst Jim Duggan, of Gartner.

“While conceptually all the vendors [IBM, Microsoft, Serena, HP, TechExcel, CollabnNet, et al] are on the same path, Borland is getting to the meat of the management stuff with less of the ‘buy my old stuff too’ that some of the older ALM offerings demanded,” Duggan said in an e-mail. “The need is to support planning, measurement, reporting, and control of the development activities without necessarily forcing the teams to buy the vendor’s flavor or requirements elicitation, modeling, or test execution.”

In offering three separate products, Borland sees multiple entry points and hopes to use each tool as an on-ramp for a slightly different group of buyers, Duggan said.

“I think the problem is that a full solution really uses parts of all three tools and they could all have been packaged together,” Duggan said.  

A bidirectional linking service allows users to view assets and information in native ALM repositories via BMS products. This approach is called SAM, or Single Asset Multiple Environments, and it prevents data duplication and synchronization problems across tools, Borland said.

Borland has been using the tools in-house. “One of the key benefits that I’ve received from the products is the ability to reduce disruption to the team,” said Chuck Maples, Borland vice president of development. Deployed by teams in Singapore, the EMEA region, and the United States, the BMS products provide instant status reports on products, Maples said.

“I think the biggest challenge has been the availability aspect. How do you handle all the information you’re able to collect,” said Maples.

There is a high level of information offered and visibility, but participants need to be reassured, he stressed. “You don’t want to create a situation where people feel as though they’re being watched,” Chuck said.

Distributed development needs oversight, Duggan said.

“Any of the measurement tools can be misapplied to put a process straight-jacket on a team. For at least a decade we’ve been emphasizing that ‘just enough process’ should be the guideline,” Duggan said. “The difficulty is that, although audit standards and the complexity of distributed development have raised the need for oversight, many teams are still trying to skate by on largely manual (and un-auditable) measurements and processes. Some of the aspects of oversight will be needed by some teams. Few will need all.”