Borland Software, in its latest bid to improve the way software development projects are managed, introduced new software to ease the requirements process.

Borland said in a statement that defining requirements helps close the gap between business managers and IT administrators to ensure that the right ingredients are used in the software stack from the get-go.

The heart of Borland's new Requirements Definition and Management solution is Caliber DefineIT, which helps teams capture end-user scenarios in a visual form that both business and IT users understand.

It then enables analysts to outline requirements with attributes, screenshots, prototypes, images and text-based documents.

Much like writers do for movie scripts, software teams can then create storyboards and test cases so stakeholders can decide if the requirements are accurate.

The company said it created DefineIT after listening to software development experts and users who have said poor requirements are the main reason for the failure of software projects.

Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of products at Borland, said most requirements management products focus only on tracking the status and evolution of requirements, not whether the requirements are defined correctly up front or validated by users.

The Borland Requirements Definition and Management solution, which will be sold in early May, will integrate with its own ALM products, as well as Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, Mercury Quality Center and Eclipse. Borland also expects integration with Segue SilkTest to be completed this year.

Requirements Definition and Management is one of the four core software development processes that Borland is pushing to improve software development. It joins IT Management and Governance, Change Management and Lifecycle Quality Management as part of its Software Delivery Optimization strategy.

In related software development news, BEA Systems today announced the availability of BlueDragon, BEA WebLogic Edition.

BlueDragon, which BEA is licensing from server-side software maker New Atlanta, will help customers run legacy ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) applications on BEA WebLogic Server.

With BlueDragon, developers can redeploy legacy code onto WebLogic without having to rewrite software.

Blake Connell, BEA's director of Weblogic Server marketing, said BEA is doing this because several of its customers are still using CFML to run their businesses.

The releases is BEA's latest maneuver to extend service-oriented architecture (define) across its product line.