News

Compuware partnerships to drive CARS

• By Rich Seeley
• September 8, 2004

Compuware has partnered with Spherion Corp. and Sogeti USA to advance its offering of QA tools and consulting packaged as the Compuware Application Reliability Solution, says Gery Plourde, CARS director.

Spherion and Sogeti USA are IT consulting firms with a strong commitment to QA and testing, Plourde adds. They will integrate CARS into their QA offerings.

Sogeti will use CARS in conjunction with its Test Management Approach (TMap), which Plourde describes as an industry-recognized testing methodology; it is also the foundation of Sogeti's Software Control Testing (SCT) practice. A combined offering, to be called 'CARS for TMap,' will automate TMap process management and reporting to speed testing, he says. It also reflects Compuware's strategy of allowing its partners to integrate CARS into their existing offerings, Plourde adds.

Since CARS' June launch, Plourde says he is seeing increased awareness among consultants and IT development managers to take testing beyond the usual QA process.

'People and organizations are pretty mature in their usage of technology from a load-testing perspective,' Plourde says. 'Whether they use our tools or competing products, they pretty much understand that we better throw 'x' number of virtual users at this to make sure it's going to stand up when we roll it out. But I think the one area that has been refreshing to see recently is that a lot of organizations realize they have to do that from a network perspective as well.'

He says this includes testing for usage by users coming into a WAN from many locations around the world, which, he contends, is a major strength of CARS.

'One other area is file data management, which seems to have more relevance for customers now,' Plourde says. Development and QA teams under deadlines to launch applications often do not find problems in this area until they are in production because they didn't test with real-world data, he says. Seeking to avoid such failures, QA professionals are looking for ways to test file handling before production.

'Another strength we think we bring [to the table] is our file data management tools that allow customers to quickly implement production-like data so they can run appropriate testing, and find [and fix] problems earlier,' he says.

Links: Further information on Compuware and CARS is available at http://www.compuware.com

Information on Sogeti USA can be found at http://www.sogeti.com/

Information on Spherion can be found at http://www.spherion.com/

For other Programmers Report articles, please go to http://www.adtmag.com/newsletters.asp?nl=PRT