Survey results released today by Borland show that the majority of organisations are delivering software in extremely heterogeneous environments, with nearly 90 per cent relying on multiple ALM tools from several different vendors to get the job done. The survey also explored organisations’ top software delivery priorities and challenges and looked at the top ALM-related initiatives Borland customers plan to tackle in the coming year.
According to the survey, which polled more than 300 Borland customers in May and June 2007, 69 per cent of respondents support two or more development platforms, with 42 per cent deploying to both Java and .NET environments. The survey also revealed that half of respondents are using four or more ALM tools, and that 33 per cent of them have tools from more than three different vendors. In addition, 44 per cent of respondents reported that they use two or more software development processes, with agile methodologies and custom processes receiving the highest percentages of votes.
“The survey results offer further evidence that our Open ALM strategy is aligned with customer needs,” said Marc Brown, vice president of product marketing at Borland. “Borland understands that every enterprise is different – organisations are leveraging a unique, and sometimes challenging, combination of runtime platforms, multi-vendor tools and development processes – this isn’t going to change, and our Open ALM approach supports these realities by providing solutions that allow teams to best leverage their existing assets to succeed at software delivery.”
Survey responses also demonstrated that organisations are challenged to effectively manage and coordinate the end-to-end process of software delivery to achieve the full potential of ALM. More than half of respondents identified one of several “connection-related” issues – disconnected processes, lack of visibility and traceability across the lifecycle, lack of metrics, poor interoperability between tools, functional silos – as the biggest software delivery challenge or deficiency their IT organisation needs to overcome.
“If I look at our software delivery team today, we have the tools and processes in place to support the various roles and functions – we’ve invested a great deal,” said George Cerny, quality assurance manager at SmartSignal. “For us, the next step really is to find a way for these tools to ‘talk’ to each other so that we can begin to have a single platform that joins team members, manages critical assets and activities, and provides a way to coordinate, measure and manage all the phases as a whole. The benefits in terms of development efficiency and application quality would be incredible.” |
