The company opened its annual BorCon conference in San Jose, California, yesterday, unveiling Themis, Hyperion and Prometheus – product milestones rolling out during the next 12 to 18 months under a new campaign, called Software Development Optimization (SDO).
Announcing the strategy, senior vice president of software products, Boz Elloy called SDO an evolution of the company’s existing ALM strategy and products, to speed development, cuts costs and reduce the risk associated with software development.
SDO is designed to provide those traditionally outside the software development process, such as business managers, with greater ability to account for the impact on budgets and delivery times of changes to projects, such as changing features mid-way through the build.
Borland equated SDO with ERP, introduced to make manufacturing processes more reliable, predictable and efficient using software. Elloy said even though software is pervasive, in today’s world, the process of building software itself has not been updated.
We are the cobbler’s children, Elloy told BorCon delegates. Software is used to optimize every other business process in the world, yet nothing has been done about our software process, Elloy said.
Quoting the Standish Group, Elloy noted 30% of software projects are cancelled, 44% are too expensive, 60% are not considered a success by the business and 90% are delivered late.
Themis, Hyperion and Prometheus will see roles-based access to Borland’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools along with process management, portal and Business Intelligence (BI) features that provide greater control over, and improved visibility into, all stages of the ALM process.
Themis will deliver the first installment on Borland’s roadmap, roles-based access to Borland’s tools for analysts, architects, developers and testers. Themis is due in the first half of 2005.
Speaking after his keynote, Elloy told Computer Wire roles based access would mean architects, for example, require aspects of CaliberRM requirements management tool to do their job along with elements of the Together Unified Modeling Language (UML) and JBuilder Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
You should just get the bits you need, Elloy said of SDO.
Project Hyperion will introduce portal-based access to ALM projects, providing roles-based views and task notification and – ultimately – greater visibility and predictability.
In the new world you will come in and there will be a portal for you and your role. Instead of having an empty pallet [when you log in] it will have a list of the things you need to work on and your favorite things and the right tool for the right context will be opened up. If you have a bug to fix it will be opened up in the context of the portal, Elloy said.
