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Compuware is one of the leading APM vendors, having consolidated its position with its acquisition Gomez in October 2009. The vendor now has a performance-management portfolio that covers enterprise environments (application servers, middleware servers, Java and .NET environments, mainframe environments, database servers, networks, and proprietary and custom business applications) as well as the Internet. This facilitates end-to-end visibility into application performance. The vendor has shown its intent…
Technology Audits - published 23/08/2010 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff
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Today’s typical IT organization has scant resources for supporting enterprise innovation. With 75% – or more – of the IT budget consumed by maintenance, there is little left over for IT to develop the software that helps enterprises maintain their competitive edge. Compounding the issue, application development organizations carry poor reputations for delivering software projects on time, on budget, and on scope. A major culprit is that the application lifecycle is managed – like many other IT domains – …
Technology Management and Strategy Reports - published 23/07/2010 - Michael Azoff, Rob Hailstone, Tony Baer
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The requirements definition and management (RDM) market is currently an active space to watch, particularly when viewed in the context of the broader application lifecycle management (ALM) market, which is populated with over a dozen key vendors including major players such as HP, IBM, and Microsoft. The software development landscape is shifting towards Agile development practices and moving away from the traditional waterfall development model; thus we see many new players in the ALM space, addressing …
Technology Audits - published 08/06/2010 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff, Sandeep Mishra
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ThoughtWorks Studios provides the Adaptive ALM product suite. It is a holistic Agile ALM offering that addresses all aspects of Agile software development. ThoughtWorks Adaptive ALM comprises the products Mingle, Cruise, and Twist. Mingle is an Agile project management solution, Cruise offers build, configuration and release management functionality, and Twist provides test automation capabilities. These individual products are all organically built and available collectively or as stand-alone solutions....
Technology Audits - published 05/05/2010 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff
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emergn is a global professional services and business consulting firm that blends Lean and Agile principles and practices to optimize the way organizations develop and deliver solutions across the enterprise. At the core of emergn is emergnEnablement, the company’s problem-centric and value-driven continuous improvement platform. The emergnEnablement platform comprises three primary components: a knowledge platform comprised of best practices; a delivery program that creates flow; continuous improvement …
Technology Audits - published 27/04/2010 - Michael Azoff
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The introduction of Agile and lean principles into software development has helped raise the level of maturity of the field, but there is still a long way to go, and in some respects it is two steps forward one step back. A number of implementations of Agile, for example, have resulted in developers being handed carte blanche with ensuing anarchy. This is hardly the fault of Agile and the problem is with how it was adopted. But in some respects this is a problem with Agile because apart from the Scrum ce…
Technology Audits - published 27/04/2010 - Michael Azoff
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Seeburger Business Integration Server (BIS) is an all-inclusive business-to-business (B2B) gateway solution that provides a single-platform approach to the delivery of an organization’s business-partner, supply-chain, and internal systems-integration requirements. The product set, which can be described as a full-featured, end-to-end, B2B electronic data interchange (EDI) solution, is unique in that all the product components have been developed in-house by Seeburger. Across its range of data and systems…
Technology Audits - published 08/04/2010 - Andy Kellett
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Tasktop Technologies provides a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE that acts as the front end to third-party project-management tools. It organizes a software developer’s desktop by filtering the Eclipse interface to show only the pertinent source code, documents, or web pages. This task-management approach makes it easier for developers to keep project-management tools up to date, such as after an interruption, while reducing the need to repeatedly search for information while multitasking.
Technology Audits - published 18/03/2010 - Tony Baer
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RAD Studio from Embarcadero Technologies comprises the Delphi, C++ Builder, and Delphi Prism integrated development environments (IDEs). The developer studios were acquired from Borland spin-off CodeGear, and continue to attract a loyal following estimated by the vendor at 1.5 million developers. Embarcadero is giving the tools a new lease of life with investment to release hitherto-shelved innovations, modernize the feature sets, and help grow the user community.
Technology Audits - published 17/03/2010 - Michael Azoff
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With Codice Software’s Plastic SCM software-configuration and change-management (SCCM) solution, currently in version 2.9, Codice has sought to make the experience of SCCM as painless as possible with features including a 3D visualization of branches for transparency in complex builds and versioning. It is a highly scalable solution that also offers a small footprint and fast installation, a client-server system that can operate in offline mode, and multi-platform support. While SCCM solutions are well e…
Technology Audits - published 17/03/2010 - Michael Azoff
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A1QA is a fairly small but fast-growing testing-related specialist services subsidiary of Itransition, a larger services business. Many organisations are blighted by poor testing capabilities, and yet quality assurance of software is a key need in times when business processes are so integrated with software and dependent on it. Ovum believes A1QA’s experience and expertise gained across a variety of industries is highly valuable, and its strong testing automation playbook has the promise of readily achi…
Technology Audits - published 10/02/2010 - Alan Rodger
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Microsoft Silverlight, currently in version 3 (and 4 beta), is Microsoft’s Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform. It is installed as a Web browser plug-in to offer a rich user experience and enterprise-strength capability from small to large-scale commercial applications. Supported on Windows, Mac OS-X, and some Linux operating systems, the technologies behind the tool are XAML, the XML application mark-up language, and .NET. XAML is used for defining the UI, and .NET is used to program the applicatio…
Technology Audits - published 01/02/2010 - Michael Azoff
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Original Software provides Qualify, an application quality management solution that adapts to the way QA teams work and helps centralise the software quality and quality management processes within an organisation. Qualify is currently in version 1.5. The product takes a holistic view of the software quality lifecycle, covering requirements management, resource and task planning, scheduling, automated test execution, manual test monitoring, defect and issue management, and reporting. The product also off…
Technology Audits - published 01/02/2010 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff
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CollabNet TeamForge is a Web-based application-lifecycle management (ALM) platform suited to globally distributed development activities. Key functionality includes project management, Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM) through the embedded CollabNet Subversion, and defect management. TeamForge integrates with the Hudson open-source platform for Web-based build and test-management functionality. CollabNet also offers an optional separately priced module for lab management in virtual and …
Technology Audits - published 26/01/2010 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff
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IBM Rational’s Rational Quality Management suite contains products to manage all aspects of software quality management. The solution set includes products for centralised test management, test lab management for physical as well as virtual environments, test data management, functional testing automation, performance testing automation, Web Services and SOA testing automation, dynamic source code analysis, and embedded systems testing. Rational Quality Manager (RQM), Rational Functional Tester, and Rati…
Technology Audits - published 21/01/2010 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff
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Silk Suite from Micro Focus is a suite of testing products that provides QA and development teams with a comprehensive approach to software application testing. It allows organizations to centrally manage manual testing and automated functional and performance testing of a wide variety of applications including Web-based, Java, Microsoft .NET, and native GUIs. Silk Suite comprises SilkCentral Test Manager (SCTM) for test management, SilkTest for automated functional and regression testing, and SilkPerfor…
Technology Audits - published 13/01/2010 - Michael Azoff
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Green Hat provides GH Tester, a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) lifecycle quality-management toolset that performs code-free end-to-end testing for complex and heterogeneous SOA and Enterprise Architecture Integration (EAI) deployments. GH Tester automates the visualisation, verification, and virtualisation of unit, functional, regression, system, simulation, performance, and integration testing, as well as production performance-monitoring, and is suitable for automating testing in Agile processes. …
Technology Audits - published 08/12/2009 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff
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The Thinkmap SDK is a Java-based platform for developing applications that aid organisations in visualising sets of dynamic, complex, structured data. The solution offers native support for relational databases, XML, and flat files, and ships with a flexible data source API that lets organisations integrate the application with any underlying source data set. Once developed, Thinkmap applications can be embedded as a Java applet and published via any standard Web browser, or can be embedded within Java-b…
Technology Audits - published 25/11/2009 - Balachandar Ganesh, Richard Edwards
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Adobe Flex version 4.0 is a framework for developing rich internet applications (RIAs) based on the Flash Player. The development framework can lower costs and shorten time to market by enabling applications to be deployed identically across a variety of platforms and browsers. Flex comprises an open source software development kit that provides a compiler, a code debugger, the development languages MXML and ActionScript 3.0, and a component library. Separately licensable components are Flash Builder 4, …
Technology Audits - published 20/11/2009 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff
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A scenario typical across many office environments is when a user rings the help desk to say that their software application is running slow.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 30/10/2009 - Michael Azoff
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The momentum in cloud computing continues as key players such as Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and numerous others build up services, for example VMware/SpringSource Cloud Foundry. The cost benefit in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is attractive compared to traditional on-premise solutions, for example in collaboration and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) – see Ovum Papers “The Impact of Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing on Enterprise Collaboration” by Richard Edwards, and “ALM and SaaS: should developer…
OpinionWire Articles - published 29/10/2009 - Michael Azoff
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eoLogic’s eoSense is a dynamic application architecture analyser for Java Enterprise Edition environments that helps uncover architectural issues likely to cause application failure during load testing or in production environments that could lower the cost of quality over the development lifecycle. The solution supports various commonly used Java EE frameworks and also provides a best-practice-based knowledge base for addressing the issues identified during the analysis phase. eoSense comprises a client…
Technology Audits - published 20/10/2009 - Chandranshu Singh, Michael Azoff
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The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is at the frontline of developments to push computation capability, of interest to the High Performance Computing (HPC) community and also predicted to filter down to generic, next generation PCs. The transformation of GPUs into microchips designed for General-Purpose computation on GPUs (GPGPU) is the result of a desire to tap into their Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) unit architecture. Now NVIDIA has announced a significant raising of the bar with the Fermi GPU a…
OpinionWire Articles - published 12/10/2009 - Michael Azoff
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Organisations of all sizes are under mounting pressure to ensure that the applications that they deploy fulfil all required compliance, user safety, and threat protection demands. It is increasingly clear that software testing facilities that have been designed to identify and remediate against security vulnerabilities need to start their work at the earliest stage possible of the technology lifecycle.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/09/2009 - Andy Kellett
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The ideas of Lean Thinking originated within the car manufacturer Toyota, where it was called the Toyota Production System. The approach was popularised outside Japan in a book called The Machine That Changed The World by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos, who carried out research at MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) group. A follow up book was called Lean Thinking. The term ‘Lean’ itself was first coined by John Krafcik, also from IMVP, in a 1988 paper “Triumph of the Lean Production System”.
Butler Group Review Articles - published 28/09/2009 - Michael Azoff
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