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.