Borland Core SDP™ (Software Delivery Platform) FAQ
Q: What is Borland Core SDP?
A: Borland Core SDP is Borland's first fully integrated Software Delivery Platform, and marks the first key deliverable in fulfilling Borland's Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) vision. It is a role-based, process-enabled collaborative platform for application lifecycle management (ALM), and will help customers shift software development from a chaotic art form into a managed business process.
The platform provides a customized work environment for analysts, architects, developers and testers – optimized for specific job functions, yet integrated across the other roles within the application lifecycle. The process-enabled, collaborative architecture enables individual roles to have more visibility across other roles and phases in the lifecycle to work more efficiently with each other and other teams in the organization.
Organizations are able to use Borland Core SDP to maximize individual contributions while ensuring constant alignment with overall business objectives through connected software delivery processes. Borland Core SDP helps deliver a predictable, repeatable software development process.
Q: Why is Borland releasing Borland Core SDP to the market now? Why is it important today?
A: We all count on software today more than ever before. Software is a critical differentiator and competitive advantage for those businesses able to leverage it effectively. Yet today, more than 2/3 of software projects are considered a failure while success rates are declining, rather than improving. With today's IT complexity, dynamically changing business objectives, and the rise of distributed teams, the risks and challenges of software development are no surprise to enterprises. But it's a problem we can't afford NOT to deal with.
With Software Delivery Optimization, a disciplined approach that aligns people, process and technology, Borland addresses this problem head on. Borland Core SDP begins to lay the foundation necessary to make SDO a reality. Its focus is on roles and pain points, not features and functionality. This "role-centric" approach is something Borland's customers have asked for, and represents the future of software development. It provides an optimized environment to bring both individual and team contributions to new levels. In addition, Core SDP's process-enabled architecture can help support, enable, accelerate and automate key initiatives such as CMMI,® Six Sigma,™ and regulatory compliance quality standards that are so important in today's marketplace. The focus on roles and process will be critical in helping transform software from black art to a managed business process.
Q: How does Core SDP relate to Borland's ALM strategy announced last year?
A: Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the market space that Borland Core SDP addresses. Core SDP moves Borland's ALM strategy forward by delivering best-of-breed ALM functionality through customized role-based environments that are tightly integrated with cross-platform communication and collaboration functionality. The result is an innovative ALM platform that optimizes both individual and team contributions.
Q: What is the architecture of the platform?
A: Borland Core SDP implements a role-based architecture as the foundation of the software delivery process. It provides each role within the application lifecycle with integrated tools that maximize individual contributions and foster workflow across job functions. Specifically, the Core SDP architecture includes tool suites for the following roles:
- Core::Analyst - Allows business analysts to clearly translate business objectives into functional software requirements, ensuring end-user expectations, compliance mandates, and quality objectives are met.
- Core::Architect - Enables architects to keep specifications, models, and code in sync throughout the entire application lifecycle, even in the face of changing business requirements.
- Core::Developer - Combines best-in-class tooling with a developer-focused view into relevant specifications, change requests, and test cases.
- Core::Tester - Guarantees applications achieve functional, compliance, and quality goals by linking testing teams with defect tracking and requirements management.
The role modules are highly integrated with each other and work with the underlying platform foundation to enable cross-role functionality, customized workflow capabilities, and increased visibility.
Q: What customer benefits does Borland Core SDP offer?
A: Core SDP offers the following main benefits to enterprise organizations:
- Increased control: Enables software to be developed on time, on budget, and within scope with flexible, automated, and customized workflows integrated into the platform.
- Increased visibility: Fosters streamlined cross-role information flow for better team collaboration and visibility to management with integrated, real-time project reports that reflect business metrics. Also provides visibility into artifacts upstream and downstream from roles.
- Increased efficiency: Automates routine tasks and creates custom processes to maximize individual and team productivity and increase efficiencies throughout the software development process.
- Increased predictability: Reduces risk with a predictable development process that delivers repeatable success. Embedded diagnostics, workflow integration, and visibility across roles help address errors earlier in the cycle.
Q: What's new in Core SDP?
A: Core SDP is a fully integrated role-based, process-enabled platform for software delivery optimization. As a role-based solution, it targets the specific pain points of each role in the software lifecycle. As a process-enabled platform, it can improve efficiency, control, and predictability of the overall development process.
Core SDP draws out and integrates specific functionality from Borland's existing ALM products – CaliberRM,™ Together,® JBuilder,® (or Eclipse), StarTeam,® and Optimizeit™ – and combines this with new cross-platform capabilities. The platform includes a collaborative architecture for communicating and managing knowledge across distributed teams, as well as a centralized repository for storing and searching assets, for capturing and reporting ALM metrics, and for advanced traceability and impact analysis.
The workflow and process foundation in this new platform is strong enough to enforce discipline and accountability yet flexible enough to facilitate any kind of development methodology a customer might have in place.
Q: What integrations have been performed in Borland Core SDP?
A: Core SDP includes tight integration of Borland's ALM tools suite, including the CaliberRM requirements management, Together modeling, JBuilder IDE, StarTeam change and version management, and Optimizeit product sets. In addition to JBuilder, the developer role component of the platform is integrated with the open Eclipse 3.0 development framework – fostering customer choice and developer flexibility. There are numerous other third-party integrations that Borland has performed with Core SDP, with more being built into future versions of the product.
The platform includes extensive cross-role and cross-platform functionality, giving software teams access to integrated tools with job function and role-based access to specific functionality.
Q: Which types of enterprise organizations does Borland Core SDP target?
A: Core SDP is well-suited for any enterprise organization looking to improve and evolve its software delivery process (large or small) and maximize the business value of its software. It is an ideal solution for a variety of software development initiatives, including new application development, application integration, and packaged application implementation.
Q: How does Borland Core SDP make it easier for organizations to improve their application development processes?
A: The platform assists with the authoring, automation, and enforcement of development processes by establishing a rule-based workflow to assist both individual and team contribution. This drives repeatable process for higher-quality software that can help meet business needs and compliance standards.
Q: Are you going to maintain your existing point products?
A: Yes. We'll continue to develop and enrich the functionality of our stand-alone products as well as our Software Delivery Platform. Many of our existing customers have made investments in the traditional product offerings. We will continue to support these customers with best-of-breed functionality.
Q: What languages and platforms does Core SDP support?
A: Borland Core SDP is designed to support heterogeneous customer environments, including multiple platforms and processes, continuing Borland's core value of offering customer flexibility. For example, assets from Core::Analyst and Core::Architect can be imported into Microsoft® .NET environments. Core::Developer offers client-side support for the Eclipse 3.0 development framework as well as Borland's own Java™ development environment, based on JBuilder technology.
Borland is a close partner with Microsoft, and we will continue to maintain the same interoperability experience with .NET and our standalone products as well as our platform component.
Q: When will Borland Core SDP be generally available?
A: The product will be available for purchase in late Q1 of this year, with the quarter coinciding with the calendar year.