Parasoft Concerto targets policy-driven development |
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By Colleen Frye
12 Aug 2009 | SearchSoftwareQuality.com |
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Parasoft Corp. enters the software development management space today with the launch of Parasoft Concerto, an infrastructure for policy-driven development that enables organizations to set expectations, govern workflow, manage tasks and monitor quality and compliance.
According to the company, Concerto not only ties together Parasoft's existing test and code analysis tools into an integrated solution, but also is designed to work with an organization's current application lifecycle management (ALM) investments in requirements management, defect tracking, source control management, build management and test management.
Concerto comprises five elements: policy center, process center, project center, test center and report center.
"The automated infrastructure sits in the background to connect their development infrastructure; to drive greater productivity, deliver greater software quality, and moreover, gain greater visibility end to end in the software development lifecycle," said Wayne Ariola, Parasoft vice president of strategy.
For example, he said, "a requirement comes in from anywhere. [Concerto] raps it with a policy and drives it through the infrastructure. When it's completed we check off that it met policy expectations. The key is having the ability to passively monitor and be unobtrusive to a developer's work; but we want to nudge them each time their actions don't align with policy expectations."
Say, for instance, static code analysis identifies an error and the developer tries to mark the requirement as complete. Through Concerto's policy-driven task management, the developer would be notified that there is still an error that needs to be remediated, Ariola explained.
Ariola calls Parasoft Concerto an extension or next chapter for the company. "Prior to Concerto we looked like a tool-oriented vendor with an SOA solution and a secure application development solution. By prying apart those key quality components and driving them through the SDLC with a policy overlay we can establish best practices in terms of software dev, monitored by the encompassing policy, and we can see how that's being achieved through multiple projects."
Competitively, Ariola said Micro Focus with the Borland Open Application Lifecycle Management (Open ALM) solution is the closest to Parasoft in terms of an end-to-end offering. He also cites WebLayers in the SOA governance/policy area, along with RallyDev, CollabNet and VersionOne in the task management space.
Parasoft released Concerto to its existing customer base in January, and now is releasing it publicly. Concerto currently supports the following requirements management systems: IBM Rational's DOORS and RequisitePro and HP Quality Center, as well as MS Project, Word and Excel. Support for source code repositories includes Subversion, AccuRev, CVS, Visual Safe Source, ClearCase and others. Build management systems supported include: Ant, Maven, CruiseControl and others. Supported test management systems include Visual Studio Team System and HP Quality Center and others. And supported bug tracking systems include Bugzilla, ClearQuest and Jira.
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