TechExcel touts unified ALM

TechExcel on Wednesday is launching DevSuite, which the company positions as a unified platform for the enterprise application lifecycle management space.

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Featuring upgrades to three existing products as well as a new offering, DevSuite eliminates silos of knowledge that exist between different teams in an enterprise, according to TechExcel. Leveraging what the company calls a knowledge-centric architecture, the suite is intended to enable enterprises to better communicate and reduce development cycle times.

"We have a common module, which is a knowledge management engine where all the document information is saved as knowledge," said Tieren Zhou, CEO of TechExcel. The engine is the KnowledgeWise component of the suite.

Although other ALM vendors such as Borland Software also tout an integrated approach, TechExcel differs, said analyst Carey Schwaber, of Forrester Research.

"What puts TechExcel in a better position than many other vendors to actually deliver on this vision is the fact that is products share many common infrastructural components. For example, they all have the same very powerful workflow engine," Schwaber said.

Three types of knowledge items are managed in the suite. These include documents, which refer to external files such as Word documents; topics, which feature pertinent information in a note-like format, and HTML items, which link to external Web pages. These items are linked to development tasks. The concept of a subproject is used to organize projects into specific functional areas, job roles or physical locations.

Suite components include the following:

-- KnowledgeWise, which serves as a system for collecting ideas and the knowledge engine supporting the suite. The software provides a common set of knowledge access points and provides role-based visibility.

-- DevPlan, a new module that manages transformations of concepts into strategy plans. A planning hierarchy is featured to set a project's scope and optimize resource usage. Team-based planning and calendaring also are included.

-- DevTrack, which builds on the vision and deliverables of DevPlan to manage an implementation process. Workflow, notification, escalation, routing, version control, and testing are coordinated.

-- DevTest, which helps quality assurance teams manage testing. It manages functional regression testing, performance testing, and usability testing. Test case templates are used to link to a specific DevPlan feature to provide visibility into feature-related knowledge. 

The suite is priced at $1,200 per user; individual components also are available separately.