Borland Software, CollabNet, and Electric Cloud are rolling out products for ALM (application lifecycle management) and collaboration this week, including a preview of Borland's Gauntlet, for early quality control.
As part of its Software Delivery Optimization strategy for ALM, Borland is shipping its Borland LQM (Lifecycle Quality Management) offering. The package features multiple Borland ALM products and an early version of Gauntlet, which provides a developer test and defect prevention system that builds quality checks into existing development tasks.
Also included in LQM are the company's Silk products for testing, including SilkTest, SilkPerformer, and SilkCentral Test Manager, as well as Caliber products for requirements management and definition. Training and best-practices services are also part of LQM. Users can use any combination of the products.
"Essentially, Borland's solution is the first integrated ALM solution that links business requirements to code to test cases in an automated and traceable way," said Rob Cheng, director of developer solutions at Borland.
Although LQM might appear to be just a packaging of a multitude of Borland ALM products, seamless integration is key. "Part of the announcement around LQM is Borland has added a number of integration between those products," Cheng said. Integration between the Silk and Caliber offerings, for example, links a requirement to testing.
Headlining LQM is Gauntlet. Acquired by Borland in February, Gauntlet enables testing earlier and more often in the development process. Quality measures can be monitored to reduce rework, improve team productivity, and provide greater visibility into application health, according to Borland. Residing on existing software configuration management and version control systems, Gauntlet isolates quality issues before defects are propagated throughout a code base. Third-party plug-ins can work with Gauntlet to test for additional issues with security, license compliance, code readability, and other factors.
Gauntlet 1.0, the generally available version of the product, is due to ship by the end of the year.
With Gauntlet, Borland is addressing a critical problem: a lack of early testing in the software development cycle, which has resulted in poor-quality software, said analyst Rikki Kirzner, CEO of Centennial Global Research. Software bugs can have major consequences, such as Toyota's recent recall of its Prius automobiles and Segway's recall of its scooters, Kirzner said.
"The problem with software bugs and software defects has gotten worse over the years," Kirzner said. "As software products have become more complex and software becomes more sophisticated, the issues of bugs are not going away."
"The issue is that testing after the fact is too late," Kirzner said. While applauding Borland's Gauntlet effort, Kirzner did add that the product is young and needs additional integration with other lifecycle pieces.
Pricing for LQM is set on a case-by-case basis. SilkCentral, for example, costs between $1,700 to $2,000 for a named user.
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