BORL: Borland Unveils Lifecycle Quality Management Solution, Enabling IT to More Confidently Deliver Higher Quality Software

Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ: BORL, www.borland.com), the global leader for Software Delivery Optimization (SDO), today unveiled the Borland Lifecycle Quality Management (LQM) solution. A new offering designed to enable customers to deliver every application with confidence, Borland's LQM solution ensures quality is built into software at the very point of project definition, tested earlier and more often, and traced throughout every phase of the software delivery lifecycle.

The Borland LQM solution offers the first integrated ALM product suite that links business requirements to code to testing priorities and activities in an automated and traceable way. This connection helps break down barriers between business, development and QA teams so IT organizations can have more confidence that the software they deliver meets business requirements, is on-time, and offers correct code with minimal defects. In addition to ALM technology, the Borland solution includes a proven set of process best practices, assessments and skills training to institutionalize a more proactive and preventative approach to software quality than what many organizations have today.

"The consequences of poor software quality are well known, yet quality is still often treated as an afterthought - something addressed late in the lifecycle with only one organization (QA) truly held accountable," said Erik Frieberg, vice president of product marketing and strategy at Borland Software. "Borland is making it easier for organizations to ensure quality is a shared responsibility across teams and throughout the lifecycle. This is a significant step in our vision for Software Delivery Optimization, and it is what our LQM solution is built to achieve."

A Proactive Solution to Improve Quality
LQM is one of the four holistic solutions that Borland offers to make software delivery a more manageable, efficient and predictable business process. The Borland LQM solution offers a solid foundation of ALM technologies to "quality-enable" all members of the software delivery team, including business analysts, architects, developers, testers and management. It includes the following components:

Gauntlet™: A better way to prevent - not react to - software defects
Gauntlet is a unique new developer test and defect prevention system that builds quality checks into existing development tasks. Gauntlet works with existing software configuration management (SCM) and version control systems to measure and analyze code as it's checked in, isolating problem code before it affects others. In addition to reducing broken builds and costly rework, Gauntlet promotes a continuous build and testing environment so all teams have greater visibility into application health earlier in the lifecycle. Gauntlet is also designed to support third-party plug-ins to test for a broad range of potential defects such as security vulnerabilities, license compliance violations, code complexity and readability.


An enterprise-class platform for software quality management
Borland SilkCentral® Test Manager™ serves as the management foundation for all pre-deployment quality activities. It is a single, powerful and open web-based test management system that supports all stages of the software quality lifecycle from planning, test management, execution and reporting of automated and manual testing activities. SilkCentral Test Manager integrates tightly with Borland SilkTest® for automated functional and regression testing and Borland SilkPerformer® for load and performance testing. It is also designed to interface easily with other open-source or commercial testing tools on the market, such as those from Mercury, to ensure customers can leverage their existing assets and investments while still pursuing a more preventative approach to quality.


Integrated ALM products for requirements-based testing, version control and enterprise defect management.
New integrations between Borland SilkCentral Test Manager and Borland's CaliberRM™ and Caliber DefineIT™ products help organizations automate the alignment of their requirements and testing processes. This enables teams to build quality metrics into requirements from the very beginning, to generate test cases directly from requirements, determine the impact of changes, and align teams to test what matters. Additionally, new integrations across the Silk™ products with Borland StarTeam® provide test asset version control and a proven, enterprise-ready defect and change management system.


Process expertise and training to ensure customer success
Technology alone cannot change the reactive, waterfall approach to quality that exists today. Therefore, the Borland LQM solution packages process consulting and educational services to refine and institutionalize a process that can help companies effectively plan, verify, validate, manage and improve software quality.

An Emerging Approach to an Age-Old Problem
"Many application development organizations overemphasize late-stage testing and tools," said Jim Duggan of Gartner in a research report targeted to CIOs¹. "Since the earliest research into software quality, it has been apparent that a balanced approach that exploits people, processes and tools at several stages throughout the life cycle can achieve improved quality and predictability at the lowest overall cost."

The ability to integrate existing software delivery processes in a more automated and efficient manner can not only help improve quality, but can also increase team productivity, lower development costs, and improve time-to-market. A recent Borland survey of almost 800 IT professionals indicates that companies are already seeking out these integrations². Over 40 percent of those survey respondents said they are in the midst of, or planning to, integrate their requirements and QA processes within the next year.

Borland's LQM solution specifically helps to align and support the following processes:

• Requirements definition and management


• Test management and execution


• Architecture and design analysis
  


• Development test and defect prevention


• Automated functional testing


• Performance and scalability testing


• Defect tracking and version control

"Quality is at the heart of our business," said Logesh Dorairaj, lead infrastructure architect for software quality engineering (SQE) at Varian Medical Systems, a leading manufacturer of medical technology for treating cancer. "Both the industry we're in and the strict compliance regulations we must deal with, such as SOX and HIPPA, require us to aim at delivering zero-defect products with high traceability. The ability to link requirements from inception through testing gives us a high level of confidence that we're delivering a quality product that's built to specifications. To do this in the past, we had to manually connect our engineering and testing processes, and the different systems used by those teams. Having a fully-integrated solution to automate this makes our processes much more efficient."

"Millions of customers rely on EarthLink's software and services daily, and Borland helps us deliver the optimal Internet experience to each and every subscriber," said Barbara Tam, senior quality engineer at EarthLink. "Working with a company like Borland helps ensure that when we upgrade or launch new and innovative products, that we are delivering a best-in-class solution each and every time."
Availability

The Borland LQM solution is available now, with the exception of Gauntlet. An early access release of Gauntlet is currently available for public download and evaluation, and the product will be generally available later this year. To download this early access release, please visit: http://www.borland.com/downloads/download_gauntlet.html.

For more information on Borland's LQM solution, please visit http://www.borland.com/us/solutions/lifecycle_quality_management/index.html.