Borland Updates Lifecycle Management Tools

Borland Software continued its reinvention as an application lifecycle management (ALM) developer with the release of Borland StarTeam and Borland CaliberRM, both aimed at managing the development process across a large team.

StarTeam is Borland’s software change and configuration management offering, while CaliberRM is Borland’s  enterprise requirements management offering. Both are designed to automate and coordinate enterprise software development.

Both StarTeam 2006 and CaliberRM 2006 have been updated to support enterprise application change management and development. StarTeam is the central repository for change management while CaliberRM facilitates collaboration, impact analysis, and communication among the team members.

Both products now feature integration with leading development environments, such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, Delphi and JBuilder. Compare/Merge has been enhanced to support comparing versions of source code from teams that may be physically separated, so the work of people from several locations can be compared all at once.

Also with this release, StarTeam 2006 has added server support for Linux and updated for Solaris.

Borland did an about-face earlier this year when it announced plans to divest itself of its IDEs and focus on being an enterprise ALM vendor. Cary Schwaber, an analyst with Forrester Research, said the transition is going well, but there’s still work to be done.

“I think we’ve seen the beginning of the turnaround. This stuff really does support their attempted reinvention, to take their SCM product upmarket to make it a full-featured companion to advanced tools. Other features in the new release are just incremental advances,” she said.

Borland had lower-end versions of StarTeam, for use on the group/project level, but the company abandoned that, which Schwaber thought was the right decision, because it had to compete with too many other products, including open source version control software like CVS.

This is helping Borland be viewed as an enterprise company and not be distracted by lower-end products. “Borland already had these ALM products before. Divesting the tools wasn’t necessary. Losing JBuilder doesn’t make these products stronger, it just means Borland is able to focus on these products better,” she said.

StarTeam 2006 and CaliberRM 2006 should be available next month.