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Borland Brings Requirements Engineering Rigor to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System Users

Announcement posted by Borland Australia Pty Ltd 08 Jun 2005

In other news, CaliberRM was named best application lifecycle management (ALM) tool in the 2005 MSD2D "People's Choice" awards, which recognize the best products and companies serving the .NET community.
Requirements management and CaliberRM specifically, are key components of Borlands own Software Delivery OptimizationTM (SDOTM) vision. CaliberRM is designed to offer enterprises a more efficient, cost-effective way to define, analyze, and manage software requirements across a portfolio of projects. This is critical for any organization seeking to make software development a more successful, predictable and managed business process. Visual Studio customers will soon be able to leverage CaliberRM from within their Team System environment to define and manage business, technology, operational and compliance-related requirements, helping to align project stakeholders and improve project success even in the face of constant change.
Our customers more than ever need the ability to measure and communicate the impact of changing requirements to their business, said Boz Elloy, senior vice president of products of Borland. Our engineering teams have been working closely with Microsoft to ensure that Borlands CaliberRM product works seamlessly with Microsofts new development platform upon or shortly after its release to the market. We believe these product integrations will provide our joint customers with a proven requirements management package that plugs directly into the Visual Studio 2005 Team System environment.
As Visual Studio Team System emerges on the market next year and Microsoft shops begin to migrate from Visual Studio to Visual Studio Team System, continued opportunities exist for those vendors able to deliver value in areas not directly addressed by Team System, including requirements management, said Bola Rotibi, senior analyst, application lifecycle at Ovum. With Visual Studio .NET and Eclipse emerging as the de facto development environments now and in the foreseeable future, it is especially critical for vendors to provide a common set of capabilities that can be leveraged across heterogeneous development platforms, which will continue to play a major role within the enterprise landscape.
Requirements Engineering Key to Software Success
Creating high quality software, on time and on budget, starts with an accurate and comprehensive understanding of all requirements. By creating a baseline of requirements upon which key project stakeholders can agree, project managers can more accurately estimate schedule, cost and scope helping development teams to deliver against a well-defined plan.
CaliberRM and Visual Studio Team System together offer a powerful combination that enables the free flow of requirements between business analysts, developers, testers and business stakeholders. An integrated workflow ensures all required contributors and stakeholders are working toward common goals with access to accurate, updated requirements: this includes developers engineering code, testers running test plans, writers creating technical publications and marketing staff building product collateral.
The ability to define, manage and communicate requirements across the development team is a key contributor to the success of any software project, said Rick LaPlante, general manager of Visual Studio 2005 Team System at Microsoft Corp. With so many of our joint customers already using CaliberRM technology, Microsoft is excited that Borland will integrate the technology into Visual Studio Team System. Our customers will benefit greatly from the ease-of-use, unique project estimation and advanced requirements management functionality CaliberRM delivers to Team System users.
Seamless Integration Connects Requirements, Development and Testing
Requirements engineering plays a key role in the software development processes regardless of which specific process a development team chooses to use whether its MSF for CMMI, MSF agile or a customized process. CaliberRM is designed to support Microsofts process model guidance in Visual Studio Team System including those established via CMMI, agile, and the MSF process models. Users are able to set up templates based on their process of choice. For example, analysts, developers, testers and project managers can access guidance extensions to the MSF process, helping organizations make the most of the CaliberRM integration into Team System with minimal effort and apply requirements engineering best practices.
CaliberRM is also designed to work within the Visual Studio Team Foundation infrastructure, linking lifecycle artifacts with requirements and process guidance. The integrations are designed to enable CaliberRM to work seamlessly with Visual Studio Team Systems data warehouse, enabling end-to-end, requirements-to-test traceability, even in historical reporting. This will allow users to generate reports that formalize requirements data, the state of product tests, requirements, as well as generate custom reports. In addition, organizations will be able to automate ALM metrics and reporting with dashboard views of data. Requirements information will be loaded into the data warehouse with the ability to then link from CaliberRM to other objects within the environment.
Below are specific use case scenarios of the planned integration of CaliberRM and Visual Studio Team System, as defined by roles within the application lifecycle:
* Linking Requirements to Tests Once analysts enter requirements with CaliberRM, they become visible within Visual Studio Team System with test creation and development tasks linked directly to them. Consolidated test results will be available so analysts can verify not just that code was developed to meet a requirement and tests were created to test a requirement, but that the tests passed and the requirement has been successfully fulfilled.
* Developers Implementing Requirements When a requirement is created or updated in CaliberRM, the changes will immediately become visible within the Visual Studio Team System environment, and development tasks will get assigned to make sure that the product code reflects the latest requirements. When a task gets completed, its status will be available for all team members so the analyst knows the code meets the correct requirements and the tester knows there is new code ready to be validated against the updated tests.
* Creating Business Stakeholder Transparency CaliberRM provides transparency of product status through reports which show requirements, test and development task status. The integration between CaliberRM and Visual Studio Team System allows users to generate reports showing each requirement and test plan associated with the approved requirements as well as the test plan results so business stakeholders can see which requirements are being satisfied in the product for each reporting period.
Advancing SDO through Requirements Engineering
CaliberRM is a key component of Borlands Software Delivery Optimization vision, helping organizations to transform software development from an unpredictable and chaotic art into a more manageable and repeatable business process. It offers a number of advanced capabilities designed to improve visibility, predictability and control over the software delivery process. These include project planning and estimation capabilities to help users more reliably predict the required investment, effort, time-to-market and associated risks of software development projects before they begin and track against those parameters during execution.
Borlands CaliberRM requirements management solution is expected to be available for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System users in the first calendar quarter of 2006. Borland will provide an advance look at CaliberRMs integration with Visual Studio 2005 Team System at its booth (# 815) during the Microsoft TechEd Conference. For more information on Borlands software development solutions, visit http://www.borland.com/products/.
About Borland
Founded in 1983, Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ: BORL) is a global leader in platform independent solutions for software delivery optimization. The company provides the software and services that align the teams, technology and processes required to maximize the business value of software. To learn more about delivering quality software, on time and within budget, visit: http://www.borland.com.
Safe Harbor Statement
This release contains forward-looking statements as defined under the Federal Securities Laws, including the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and is subject to the safe harbors created by such laws. Forward-looking statements may relate to, but are not limited to, the projected acceptance by existing or potential customers of new products and solutions, including CaliberRM, the potential features and functionality of CaliberRM, the potential benefits of the integration between CaliberRM and Microsoft Visual Studio, the customer benefits to be derived therefrom, and the anticipated dates of availability of these new products. Such forward-looking statements are based on current expectations that involve a number of uncertainties and risks that may cause actual events or results to differ materially. Factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially include, among others, market acceptance of our products and services including our enterprise software development platform/solution; our ability to sell multi-product solutions for the application development lifecycle; the effects of a longer sales cycle as we increase our focus on larger enterprise customers; the changing nature of the markets in which we operate, namely the maturing of the Java IDE market; our failure to establish or enhance strategic alliances; rapid technological and business change that can adversely affect the demand for Borland products and services; and general economic factors and capital market conditions. These and other risks may be detailed from time to time in Borland periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including, but not limited to, its latest Annual Report on Form 10-K and its latest Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, copies of which may be obtained from www.sec.gov. Borland is under no obligation to (and expressly disclaims any such obligation to) update or alter its forward-looking statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
Borland, CaliberRM, Software Delivery Optimization, SDO and all other Borland brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Borland Software Corporation in the United States and other countries. Microsoft and Visual Studio are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corp. in the United States and other countries. CMMI is a registered trademark of Carnegie Mellon University in the United States and other countries. Agile is a registered trademark of Agile Software Corporation. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.
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