Borland releases 4th? BI application for ALM
In historic news, Borland announced the "first business intelligence (BI) application for application-lifecycle management (ALM)." We applaud Borland's efforts in this area. We absolutely agree with the direction and philosophy behind the change. However, they were a little off in their counting of solutions.
Cast has been in business for years selling software measurement and metrics solutions. SourceIQ is a more recent company, but also beat Borland to market. And of course we've been publicly available for almost 3 years.
The concept of metrics
We've learned from years of speaking with software development organizations that the concept of metrics / measurement is important. However, evolving an organization from intuition-based to fact-based is a huge transition. It certainly takes more than simply a software product to make this transformation.
Despite my tongue-and-cheek introduction, I'm truly excited that Borland is increasing the spotlight on software metrics. Their general approach is very familiar and in our mind the right way to solve the problem. And their marketing machine will bring a lot of visibility to the challenges and appropriate solution. However, I do worry about their ability to execute on the vision of this product.
OpenALM sounds promising, but it's a dream. Go to the website. There are vision statements and manifestos -- no API specifications or supported tool lists. We support over 40 ALM tools and each of them requires knowledge of a completely different API and even technology. In some cases, we've resorted to screen-scraping data from web pages. Borland has an even greater challenge of supporting their own ALM platform while dealing with their competitors' offerings. In our experience each customer has a healthy combination of best-of-breed tools.
Customers don't care about openness. They care about the insights they can derive by harvesting the data out of the tools they chose.
Don't Believe Everything You Read
So don't be deceived by marketing collateral. I'd encourage companies seriously interested in transforming their business to evaluate all the solutions in the marketplace and factor in experience and focus to their decision-making.
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