Borland software announced Lifecycle Quality Management on Oct. 2, signifying an effort to enable enterprises to build quality into every facet of an application's development process.

Rob Cheng, director of developer solutions at the Cupertino, Calif., company, said Borland's LQM solution will mean that quality is tested far more frequently in the development process, from requirements through application delivery.

"It's an integrated quality solution that links business requirement through coding, through testing and all the way through the software delivery cycle," Cheng said.

Indeed, Borland's LQM offering includes a set of best practices, skills training and integrated ALM (application lifecycle management) technology, company officials said.

Borland's LQM supports requirements definition and management, test management and execution, architecture and design analysis, development test and defect prevention, automated functional testing, performance and scalability testing, and defect tracking and version control, company officials said.

Borland announced its Gauntlet test and defect prevention system as part of its LQM solution. Gauntlet, which builds quality checks into development procedures, will not be available until later this year, but Borland has an early-access preview version of Gauntlet, Cheng said.

Borland LQM features Gauntlet's continuous build and testing environment, along with the ability to integrate with Borland's ALM products, including the company's Silk testing products (SilkTest, SilkPerformer and SilkCentral Test Manager), its requirements definition and management products (CaliberRM and Caliber DefineIT), and its software configuration management product (StarTeam).

Borland also offers process expertise and training. In addition, the company helps enterprises apply the LQM solution through Borland Accelerate, a system that evaluates an organization's process maturity.

"Many application development organizations overemphasize late-stage testing and tools," said Jim Duggan, a Gartner analyst in Stamford, Conn., in a research report targeted to CIOs.

"Since the earliest research into software quality, it has been apparent that a balanced approach that exploits people, processes and tools at several stages throughout the life cycle can achieve improved quality and predictability at the lowest overall cost," Duggan said.

"Borland's products enable our QA [quality assurance] team to more effectively support EarthLink's enterprise quality initiatives and provide the best possible user experience for our customers," said Barbara Tam, senior quality engineer at Atlanta-based EarthLink, in a statement.

"Here we push the mantra that software quality is everyone's responsibility, not just the responsibility of QA," Tam said. "It's exciting to see an innovator like Borland going a step further than others in the industry to make sure that mantra becomes the rule, rather than the exception."

Borland's Spit-Shine Tools

The company's new LQM solution:

* Introduces Gauntlet test and defect prevention system

* Integrates with Borland ALM tools, including:

Testing products SilkTest, SilkPerformer, SilkCentral Test Manager

Requirements management products CaliberRM, Caliber DefineIT

Configuration management product StarTeam

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.