Borland Rolls Out Role-Based Tools

As VP of software engineering at Conformia Software Inc., Vinay Ambekar needs to track the work of a 60-member software-development team that includes business analysts, architects, programmers, and testers. The team has operations in Redwood City, Calif., and Bangalore, India.

His company produces software that, among other things, manages the development of new drugs for pharmaceutical companies. For such software to meet compliance regulations, he must carefully manage and document the software-generation process. Before customers will deploy it, "they need to know particular functionality was designed correctly, has been tested, and works as expected," Ambekar says.

That's one reason Ambekar has adopted Borland Software Corp.'s Core Software Delivery Platform, a development architecture being unveiled this week for Borland's Java-based design and development tools that are configured around specific roles in the development process. Because the tools share a common repository, software requirements set at the beginning of the development process are readily available when it's time to test the finished application.

"Testers need to look up the business requirements to know what test cases they have to build," he says. With Core Software Delivery Platform, that visibility is quickly available. Unlike business analysts, however, testers can't make changes to the requirements.

The approach means people in different roles on a project share a common tool but get a version that's appropriate to their tasks. The tool gives them views of the project they need to work with, while maintaining consistency across models and source code. Core Software Delivery Platform will help automate each stage of development, but it's still up to the application user to set the workflow process. Unlike IBM's Rational tools unit, Borland isn't offering a development methodology along with the tool. "You have to have a good process in place and follow it," Ambekar says. And since he has one, that suits him just fine.

Core Software Delivery Platform will be available by the end of the first quarter. Pricing for the product's foundation system and role-specific modules will start at $5,900 per seat.