Outlook Series | Borland Underscores the Management in ALM

Borland Underscores the Management in ALM

July 15, 2008

Borland Management Solutions (BMS), a software delivery management platform that will enable customers to better track, measure, predict and improve the performance of their software delivery organizations has been introduced. Leveraging the Borland Open ALM Framework, BMS plugs into a customer’s existing ALM tooling infrastructure, providing an ALM management "cockpit" that gives unprecedented visibility and control over the entire application lifecycle.

While most enterprises have made investments in tools and processes that support the various "phases" of ALM – requirements management, software change and configuration management, and quality assurance – the siloed nature of these tools and processes has made it difficult to treat software delivery as a business process, with end-to-end visibility, metrics and intelligence. Borland Management Solutions finally unlock the value of these tools by providing a set of applications that software organizations can use to manage their core business process – from demand to delivery.

"IT Agility is not a 'nice to have,' it is a requirement for companies to compete in today’s global markets. IT is on the hook to deliver unprecedented levels of responsiveness, transparency, adaptability and quality," said Rick Jackson, Borland’s senior vice president of corporate strategy and CMO. "Every other business function has visibility and control over its operations, and now with BMS, software delivery organizations can benefit from that same discipline. This is not just another ALM tool; it is the first application for IT executives to run the business process of delivering software."

Borland Management Solutions include three products and a set of service packages that help software delivery organizations align their efforts with business priorities, improve their overall organizational performance, and gain confidence in their ability to consistently deliver quality results. Built on Borland's Open ALM Framework, these products work with a range of ALM tools and processes to offer complete visibility, process support and interactive dashboards that use historic and real-time ALM data to track and measure software delivery performance:

TeamDemand Align software delivery efforts with business priorities.
TeamDemand is an environment that facilitates collaboration between business stakeholders and software delivery teams to support informed decisions around IT demand. TeamDemand provides business stakeholder a "window" into the software delivery organization. Through the Open ALM Framework, TeamDemand links directly with ALM artifacts such as requirements, user stories and tasks – housed in various existing tool repositories – to provide a real-time tracking system that lets business stakeholders monitor the status and progress of requests and projects.
TeamFocus Manage execution and monitor the performance of the delivery organization.
TeamFocus is the only enterprise project management and execution environment that supports multiple delivery methods – Agile, waterfall, iterative – and rolls up monitored project progress information across the portfolio of projects. TeamFocus empowers teams to do work on their terms while giving management real-time visibility into their progress. Because TeamFocus links directly to the existing ALM environment to monitor actual day-to-day progress in real time, its dashboards include in-flight metrics that keep teams and management on the same page, without sacrificing production work for reporting overhead.
TeamAnalytics Gain confidence in the ability to consistently deliver results.
TeamAnalytics is the product that brings all of the information together, automatically collecting and analyzing current and historic data from a broad set of ALM tools. TeamAnalytics business intelligence includes a configurable set of interactive dashboards – customizable by role – that present a broad set of industry standard ALM metrics to help management build predictable delivery models, communicate progress to business stakeholders, and improve processes.

"Software delivery is notoriously complex, and the process of improvement is rife with challenges. The pressure is on for IT organizations to deliver software as a managed business process that is both efficient and predictable," said Bola Rotibi, Principal Analyst at Macehiter Ward-Dutton. "Solutions that provide this and create the transparency needed for information-sharing and intelligence will be well positioned for restoring confidence to both the delivery team and the business."

Borland Management Solutions are currently deployed at major Global 2000 enterprises participating in the BMS early access program Borland launched in early 2008 to refine the products based on real customer feedback while ensuring enterprise scalability and performance. In addition, Borland’s own software delivery organization has been using the products for more than a year.

"Our teams – which are spread across the globe – use more than 20 different methodologies and tools to deliver our extensive portfolio of products. We know how to build and ship high quality software. But to stay competitive, we are constantly looking for ways to improve the management of our processes so we can deliver more predictably," said Dave Schwarber, senior director of global product development for worldwide software provider Cincom Systems. "Borland's new Management Suite is compelling because it allows for a pragmatic, incremental approach to improving collaboration, gaining visibility and optimizing processes without disrupting the teams or impacting productivity."

The Borland Management Solutions are built upon Borland's Open ALM Framework – a services framework that leverages Internet-based technologies to connect to Borland and other industry tools for project and portfolio management, requirements definition and management, software configuration and change management, and lifecycle quality management. The Open ALM Framework unlocks the hidden value of customers' existing tools, surfacing the data housed within disparate ALM repositories for in-flight project monitoring as well as business intelligence.

Leveraging data and project connectors, the Open ALM Framework provides a bi-directional linking service that allows users to view and manipulate assets and information in their native ALM repositories, through the BMS products. This approach, called SAME or Single Asset Multiple Environments, differentiates Borland Management Solutions by preventing the problems of data duplication and synchronization across tools, and is designed to support globally distributed development.

As part of its Open strategy, Borland is bringing to market connectors for many of the primary ALM tools in the market, including those from HP, IBM and Microsoft. Additionally, Borland has initiated a connector partner program and is already working with early partners, including RingZero and Dunn Solutions, to help design and leverage an Open Connector SDK to build connectors to other ALM tools as well as custom tools that may exist within a customer's infrastructure.