News

Borland Readies Lifecycle Quality Management Bundle

• By Stuart J. Johnston
• 10/04/2006

While Borland's LQM solution is primarily aimed at development organizations working in Java, many of the tools in the quasi-bundle run on Windows. And company officials say Borland plans to expand the solution's support to work better with Windows development over time -- especially given the integration Borland features between some of its products, such as CaliberRM and Microsoft's Visual Studio tools.

The LQM solution combines versions of the Silk application lifecycle management products that Borland acquired when it bought out Segue Software in April, with the Gauntlet continuous test and product it acquired in March with the acquisition of Gauntlet Systems, and with its Caliber requirements management tools.

Not so much a bundle as an ala carte menu of integrated products as well as services and consulting, the idea is to let development teams more closely track user requirements through the entire process including quality assurance (QA).

"A lot of organizations don't test, or even build the application, as often as they should," said Rob Cheng, Borland director of developer solutions, in an interview. "When there's a problem in QA, you have to dig through weeks or months of changes."

Borland's LQM solution includes integration that has been added to the products to provide communications that enable them to, for instance, link test coverage to requirements. The addition of Gauntlet provides the ability to continuously test code as developers check it in.

Gauntlet's technology is designed to detect potential problems before they have a chance to impact other developers by automatically pre-screening all new code against a set of quality guidelines before it enters the build process.

"[The LQM solution] reinforces the notion that QA is everybody's job," said Cheng. "We are aligning the different [job] roles around the customer's business goals to provide more visability and predictability of the code that IT is delivering."

Borland plans to have the first products in its LQM solution out by year end, with another release in the first half of 2007, Cheng said.

Borland announced in February it is trying to sell off its low-level developer tools including its JBuilder and Delphi integrated development environments (IDE).

Although the company said in early May it was getting a "strong" number of bidders for that division and intended to announce a sale within "several months," that hasn't happened yet. A company spokesperson said Borland is not yet ready to announce a buyer.