Rational’s Automated Software Quality (ASQ) tools will either be based on the Eclipse Hyades project or adapted to interoperate with Hyades, IBM said yesterday.
Products under the software quality banner include IBM Rational Functional Tester for Java and Web, Robot, Performance Tester, Team Unifying Platform, PurifyPlus, Rose XDE Developer Plus and Test RealTime. IBM said it expects Hyades to feature in the next major release of the Rational tools set later this year.
IBM is a founding member of both Eclipse and Hyades. However this incremental move by Rational onto Hyades comes as IBM yesterday also announced the Continuously Ensured Quality initiative (CEQ), which it said is focused on all the roles, processes, artifacts and tools in application lifecycle management (ALM).
By improving interoperability of functionality and exchange of data across tools from IBM Rational and third-parties, through the common Hyades framework, IBM believes it can improve the quality of software produced by customers.
Poorly constructed software costs organizations more than $22bn per year, IBM said. Problems that crop-up during the early stages of the ALM cycle – notably the requirements gathering phase – mean projects are doomed to fail before coding has begun.
Eclipse and Hyades serve IBM’s overall goal, of simplifying the amount of work ISVs must undertake to plug their own ALM tools into tools from IBM and Rational. A single, open framework, theoretically, reduces the amount of integration work ISVs must undertake, potentially expanding the network of partners.
Eclipse and Hyades also provide a single interface for these different tools, so users don’t need to switch between different environments, complicating development.
IBM and Rational helped create the Hyades Project in 2002 with Parasoft, Scapa Technologies and Telelogic, to integrate a range of ASQ tools from different ISVs. Last year Hyades began an open source implementation of the Open Management Group’s (OMGs) Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2 Test Profile, which provides a structured data model to understand, capture, test and monitor data.
Hyades has created a standard universal infrastructure enabling us to create an environment for tracing [development] assets from one tool to another, senior product manager Serge Lucio said. We need to standardize on a base platform… to build solutions and extend our products.
