News

Borland Launches Requirements Management Tool

Application lifecycle management (ALM) supplier Borland Software Corp. last week launched a new requirements management package that promises to reduce the number of late and costly changes to software development projects.

Dubbed TeamDefine, the software lets dev teams and analysts visually simulate application models to provide detailed, dynamic mock-ups based on established requirements. The release comes just three weeks after British software company Micro Focus said it is acquiring the Austin, Texas-based Borland.

TeamDefine provides a visual canvas for business analysts to sketch out workflows and logic structures. These workflows can then be attached to visual application mock-ups, allowing dev teams to trial-run requirements and make changes that can be reflected back into the underlying TeamDefine definitions.

"We all know that poorly written or poorly defined requires are the root of all evil," said David Wilby, Borland's vice president of product strategy, in an interview. "The scary thing is, even though it is so well-recognized by the industry, there are very few tools for filling that gap."

TeamDefine will cater to the diverse interests of different stakeholder interests, noted Bola Rotibi, principal analyst at U.K.-based analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton, in an e-mail interview. Rotibi noted that TeamDefine integrates with Borland's CaliberRM requirements management product.

"TeamDefine is part of a new wave of simulation tools that is finally and pragmatically, in my opinion, tackling the requirements capture process for GUI-based applications," Rotibi said. "We are now starting to see the types of tools needed to really support the development of rich Internet/interactive applications, and bring it back into the folds of the software development process and workflow."

The high cost of making late changes to applications provides a compelling ROI pitch for Borland. According to a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the cost of making a change at the test or production phase of a software rollout is orders of magnitude higher than at the requirements or design phases.

Borland TeamDefine is available immediately. Pricing is set at $3,000 per user, with unlimited reviewer seats supported. More information can be found at Borland's Web site here.

About the Author

Michael Desmond is an editor and writer for 1105 Media's Enterprise Computing Group.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Windows Community Toolkit v8.2 Adds Native AOT Support

    Microsoft shipped Windows Community Toolkit v8.2, an incremental update to the open-source collection of helper functions and other resources designed to simplify the development of Windows applications. The main new feature is support for native ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation.

  • New 'Visual Studio Hub' 1-Stop-Shop for GitHub Copilot Resources, More

    Unsurprisingly, GitHub Copilot resources are front-and-center in Microsoft's new Visual Studio Hub, a one-stop-shop for all things concerning your favorite IDE.

  • Mastering Blazor Authentication and Authorization

    At the Visual Studio Live! @ Microsoft HQ developer conference set for August, Rockford Lhotka will explain the ins and outs of authentication across Blazor Server, WebAssembly, and .NET MAUI Hybrid apps, and show how to use identity and claims to customize application behavior through fine-grained authorization.

  • Linear Support Vector Regression from Scratch Using C# with Evolutionary Training

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the linear support vector regression (linear SVR) technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. A linear SVR model uses an unusual error/loss function and cannot be trained using standard simple techniques, and so evolutionary optimization training is used.

  • Low-Code Report Says AI Will Enhance, Not Replace DIY Dev Tools

    Along with replacing software developers and possibly killing humanity, advanced AI is seen by many as a death knell for the do-it-yourself, low-code/no-code tooling industry, but a new report belies that notion.

Subscribe on YouTube