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Its more than slightly perverse that most development teams know more about the interactions in their code than among their coders. Redressing that imbalance is the goal of CQ2, from the Enerjy Software division of Teamstudio. Version 1.1 of CQ2, formerly trademarked CQ2, will launch on the opening day of JavaOne.
During tests of a late beta of CQ2 1.1, eWEEK Labs found the offering a capable and informative addition to a development teams way of looking at the world. Both managers and developers will likely find that it improves their perspective on both individual performance and overall team accomplishment.
Event and trend reports from CQ2 are designed to mitigate the problem of excessively detailed, often false- positive output thats generated by many code scrutiny tools. CQ2 gives development managers considerable control in prioritizing and filtering the output from lower-level tools to provide more signal, less noise.
Often a pivotal factor in the acceptance of an über-tool such as CQ2 is ease of integration with other tools already in place. Many sites reject a rip-and-replace approach that involves high costs of developer retraining.
Enerjy assumes the burden of that integration, selling the product as a package that includes on-site installation and training support and therefore requiring site-specific discussions of deployment and pricing.
Company representatives advised us that a package for a 10-developer team begins at $30,000: not a casual purchase by any means and the kind of approach that Microsoft is challenging with its off-the-shelf packaging and affordable pricing of its VSTS (Visual Studio Team System).
Development managers will want to weigh the benefits of retaining and building on what they already have, using something like CQ2, against the relative ease of acquiring and deploying a less customized solution such as VSTS.
There was a certain hall-of-mirrors quality to our own experience in testing the CQ2 1.1 beta. The workbench runs in a browser, which we evaluated running on the Ubuntu 5.1 distribution of Linux, running, in turn, on a virtual machine under VMware 5.5.1 on a Windows XP workstation.
This was the form in which Enerjy provided the beta code for our examination. It reduced the likelihood of configuration issues impeding our tests, but it also reduced our visibility into the difficulty of setting up the product.
On the plus side, the ease with which we were able to work with this configuration says promising things about future workload reduction in enterprise development shops and data centers. The stack of enterprise code continues to become more complex: one of the reasons that tools such as CQ2 are needed.
Peter Coffee can be reached at [email protected].