Serena Delivers Application Development Management Solution

Serena Software has introduced a new solution called Application Development Management, a dashboard targeted at development executives and IT managers.

Serena ADM is an ALM (application lifecycle management) solution that enables managers to have visibility into just what is being built by their programming organizations. Executives and managers can use Serena ADM to get the current status of upcoming deliverables and product releases, monitor key software development metrics all in one place, and quickly and easily prepare for executive reviews, said Rene Bonvanie, senior vice president of IT for marketing and Serena On Demand.

"ADM is a new offering we have for both on-premise[s] and on-demand environments," Bonvanie said, indicating that Serena makes ADM available as part of its growing stable of SAAS (software as a service) offerings. "This gives the manager visibility into all the developer projects in their organization."

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Serena ADM can cover traditional application development methods as well as new methodologies such as agile development, Bonvanie said. Serena will be delivering its own on-demand agile development solution by the end of 2008, and ADM will support that, Bonvanie said.

"If you're a head of application development, many times you want to look at what you build and why you build it," Bonvanie said. "So this is not only a planning tool, but one that helps you communicate with the stakeholders in the process."

A Serena fact sheet on the ADM solution said:

All of your applications are tracked in one place. Your development teams can then update project status, track milestones and manage development costs for each product release. ADM combines this capability to track and monitor progress with the ability to present reports on key development metrics for that release. For example, ADM can easily present Serena TeamTrack/Business Mashups reports on issues and defects. In general, ADM can display any report that is URL addressable. That allows ADM to present information from across multiple development systems in one location so that you can see the big picture.

With ADM, Bonvanie said, "You can check into build metrics and other metrics … And you can look across your projects and see if there are any optimizations you can do to individual projects."

The ADM solution looks at a broad array of issues, such as plan costs and project benefits, release status, release milestones, quality metrics, support case metrics, escalations, customer commitments, defects, and application health reports, he said.

"In essence, what you have here is a portfolio management product that looks at everything you have in a resourceful way," Bonvanie said. "Although it sounds like PPM [Project Portfolio Management], generic PPM understands nothing about the software development life cycle. We use a PPM engine, but we focus it toward the software development life cycle."

Bonvanie described Serena ADM as "a natural extension to our strategy. This is an important element of our strategy. It is something that is highly incremental to what we do."

Serena provides a series of on-demand and on-premises application development tools and solutions, as well as business process improvement and PPM software.