Borland Delivers TeamInspector

Borland Software has announced TeamInspector, which the company says is a “release readiness” system that provides key metrics—code analysis, test coverage, standards compliance and build trends—ensuring development managers that the software they build is ready for customer use.

TeamInspector is the newest addition to BMS (Borland Management Solutions), the software delivery management platform that enables organizations to better track, measure, predict and improve delivery performance and quality.

“TeamInspector provides visibility into the quality of a software organization’s output through metrics that tell the real story—whether the code is solid, has been adequately tested, was built to standard and is maintainable,” said David Wilby, vice president of product strategy at Borland. “TeamInspector brings a more systematic, fact-based approach to verifying that a software release is ready to deploy.” 

Wilby told eWEEK that TeamInspector is built on the core tenets Borland has developed for delivering products that work in an open world.

Moreover, as part of the continuous build and integration process, TeamInspector’s automated inspectors gather and aggregate key readiness metrics from an array of developer test utilities, static code analysis and build tools. It then presents them in a single, actionable dashboard that displays real-time and trend information across projects, Wilby said.

Borland’s TeamInspector features an automated “inspector” infrastructure. And its automated “inspectors” gather and reveal metrics about all code-related aspects of a release. TeamInspector includes inspectors for Ant, NAnt, Checkstyle, Emma, JUnit and Nunit, Wilby said.  Borland will continue to expand this inspector library, he added.

TeamInspector also features portfolio dashboards and a build and continuous integration environment. Indeed, Wilby said TeamInspector automates the build process and then uses the build process itself to inspect the code being developed.

“A failure in a business-critical application due to the quality of the software [code and design] can easily cost a company more than just money,” said Bola Rotibi, an analyst with Macehiter Ward-Dutton. “It destroys trust between provider and user. Employing a release readiness strategy and tooling to remove defects in the development phase and earlier is an effective and efficient strategy for minimizing the impact to cost and quality.”

Wilby said with TeamInspector, “The business gets what it asked for: to ensure that development is staying on track.”

Moreover, Wilby said, Borland TeamInspector supports a variety of development processes and methodologies.

“We don’t care if you’re using waterfall, iterative or agile style development,” he said.

Built on Borland's Open ALM Framework, TeamDemand, TeamFocus and TeamAnalytics, TeamInspector works with a range of ALM (application lifecycle management) 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, the company said.