Borland Bakes Quality into Development Cycle

Borland Software's new Borland Lifecycle Quality Management solution helps enterprises emphasize quality across the development cycle.

Borland Software announced Borland Lifecycle Quality Management Oct. 2, in an effort to enable enterprises to build quality into every facet of an applications development process.

Rob Cheng, director of developer solution at the Cupertino, Calif., company, said the new Borland LQM solution will mean that quality is tested for more frequently in the development process, from requirements through application delivery.

"Its an integrated quality solution that links business requirement through coding through testing and all the way through the software delivery cycle," Cheng said.

Indeed, the Borland LQM offering includes a set of best practices, skills training and integrated ALM (application lifecycle management) technology, the company said.

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Borland LQM supports requirements definition and management; test management and execution; architecture and design analysis; development test and defect prevention; automated functional testing; performance and scalability testing; and defect tracking and version control, the company said.

Borland announced its Gauntlet test and defect prevention system as part of its LQM solution. However, Gauntlet, which builds quality checks into development procedures, will not be available until later this year, the company said. Yet, Borland has an early-access preview version of Gauntlet, Cheng said.

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Borland LQM features Gauntlets continuous build and testing environment, along with integration to Borlands ALM products, including the companys Silk testing products (SilkTest, SilkPerformer and SilkCentral Test Manager), its requirements definition and management products (CaliberRM and Caliber DefineIT), and software configuration management product (StarTeam), the company said.

Borland also offers process expertise and training. And the company helps enterprises apply the Borland LQM solution through Borland Accelerate, a system that evaluates a user organizations process maturity, the company said.

"No other vendor has this breadth," Cheng said. "This is something thats very unique to Borland," he said of the overall integration and variety included in the Borland approach.

"Many application development organizations overemphasize late-stage testing and tools," said Jim Duggan of Gartner in a research report targeted to chief information officers. "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."

"With more than 5 million subscribers relying on our services every day, its imperative that our software is built to meet their needs," Barbara Tam, senior quality engineer at EarthLink, in Atlanta, said in a statement. "Borlands products enable our QA team to more effectively support Earthlinks enterprise quality initiatives and provide the best possible user experience for our customers. Here we push the mantra that software quality is everyones responsibility, not just the responsibility of QA. Its exciting to see an innovator like Borland going a step further than others in the industry to make sure that mantra becomes the rule, rather than the exception."

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