Borland Launches ALM Management Tools

In its latest incarnation
as an Open Application Lifecycle Management (Open ALM) provider, Borland Software on Monday announced a new series of products for managers to assess the progress of a software development project.

These three tools, to be available this fall, are part of the company’s Borland Management Solutions (BMS) software, which is built on its Open ALM technology. Open ALM gathers metrics on how well a software development project is doing, such as meeting certain milestones, and provides a report for managers who can track progress throughout a project.

The whole point of Open ALM and BMS is to let managers follow along with a project, and not find out that the project is falling behind, failing to meet milestones or performance is not up to expectations before the problem is too far out of hand, according to Borland (NASDAQ: BORL) officials.

“What good is being focused on solving the problem of improving the software delivery process and managing it if you can’t see into it?” asked Rick Jackson, chief marketing officer for Borland. “That’s why we refer to it as unlocking the black box of software delivery.”

Application development life cycle tools are very siloed, even if they all come from one vendor, Jackson said. “Those tools were developed by different organizations at different times and really don’t support an end-to-end view of the software delivery life cycle,” he told InternetNews.com. “Assets aren’t viewed end to end. It makes it difficult to get metrics and measure progress when the data is separated into different repositories.”

The three products — TeamDemand, TeamFocus and TeamAnalytic — are built on the Open ALM framework, so the data is pulled from their respective stores to provide a single picture, thus addressing the “siloed” problem Jackson mentioned.

TeamDemand is the tracking software that provides people outside of the immediate development group a look into the progress. It gives managers, customers and/or users a view into the project’s development.

TeamFocus is a similar program, but more detailed and meant for people involved in the development process. It monitors day-to-day progress and includes dashboards with metrics so the whole team can watch progress of the project.

TeamAnalytics is a business-intelligence reporting tool for current projects and future projects, where there is enough data to determine how long a project might take, based on previous, similar tasks or if it will reuse existing code. Current and historic information is analyzed and presented in reports for developers and managers.

Pricing will be announced as the products get closer to shipping.