Borland Software Corp. announced CaliberRM 2005 this week, a product designed to help software project managers take some of the guesswork out of software development. It's a tool to be used for estimating the cost, scheduling and staffing of a project before any code gets written.

Borland has previously fielded a CaliberRM product for capturing the business requirements--the specifications that business users want to see met in a new application. CaliberRM's new budgeting and scheduling capabilities come from Borland's acquisition Aug. 25 of Estimate Professional from the Software Productivity Center Inc. Estimate Professional has been incorporated into the 2005 version of CaliberRM, said Boz Elloy, Borland senior vice president of software products. "Software development is not just about doing it faster. It's about doing it better," Elloy told 1,100 attendees at the annual gathering of developers, the Borland Conference, in San Jose Monday.

Producing software that meets business requirements on time and on budget is going to become a crucial competitive factor for enterprises, he predicted. "Thirty percent of projects are cancelled before they're finished," he said, and that figure will prove unacceptable to competitive companies of the future.

One function of the expanded CaliberRM will be to link project requirements to both project designs and actual blocks of source code so that developers can constantly associate the two. CaliberRM now captures a change order for a project, makes sure it's assigned to the right party and attaches the associated requirements, Elloy said. CaliberRM can also be geared to offer different views into a project based on the role of the user: business analysts, who capture requirements from users; developers who translate the requirements into code; testers who check the code; project managers supervising the work; and general business managers. It can also be used to work through what/if scenarios to illustrate how changes in staffing, budget or requirements will affect a project, he said. Borland this week also announced an upgrade to its StarTeam configuration management tool. StarTeam 2005 will allow for greater distributed team collaboration. Developers in different time zones or different countries may check out code from a central database, see what code has been worked on by other developers and query across all relevant databases, seeking the latest information on the project, Elloy said.

Both StarTeam 2005 and CaliberRM 2005 are slated to become available within 90 days.