News

Telelogic Offers Role-Based Integration of Lifecycle Solutions

• By John K. Waters
• May 31, 2005

Lifecycle management tops the industry buzz phrase list these days, but the notion that companies need to integrate the various roles in the software development process—from business analysts to system architects, designers, developers and testers—isn't just marketing speak.

"In addition to improving collaboration throughout the development lifecycle, companies are looking for closer alignment of their IT strategy and product development roadmaps with their business objectives and customer needs," says Ovum analyst Bola Rotibi. "They need lifecycle solutions that enable comprehensive understanding of current and future needs of the business and its customers."

Rotibi points to the latest release from Telelogic as an example of an emerging category of products providing this birth-to-deployment integration. The company has announced the forthcoming release of several products grouped under the label Telelogic Lifecycle Solutions. The package includes new releases of Telelogic’s DOORS, Synergy, TAU and DocExpress products.

“The news here isn’t simply that all of these products are coming out on the same day on the same set of disks,” says Matt Graney, Telelogic's VP product management for modeling and test products. “We’ve enhanced the integration among these tools so that companies will have better inter-team communication, and to support a significantly higher level of collaboration throughout the development lifecycle.”

With this release, Telelogic, which now bills itself as a provider of Automated Lifecycle Management products, is integrating its venerable DOORS requirements management tools, TAU UML tools, Synergy change and configuration management products and DocExpress, an automated reported and documentation service. The tools will remain separate, Graney explains, and do not use a common repository or file system, but users of one tool can call up the capabilities of another while remaining within the native environment of the primary tool.

This roles-based integration is central to this release, Graney tells AppTrends. “We’ve been focusing on these roles-based integrations for a while now,” he says. “If, for example, someone working on a model needs to access requirements so they know what they ought to be modeling, rather than switching back and forth from the modeling tool, TAU, to DOORS, they can instead view a snapshot of the requirements from the DOORS database directly inside TAU. Similarly, you can view a change request to a requirement that might have been initiated from inside Synergy Change directly from inside DOORS.”

This common release also does more than simply get Telelogic's product offerings on the same schedule, says Graney. It provides master installation and licensing of the three products, and common user administration. Also with this release, the company is introducing token-based licensing. An organization buys a set of tokens for the entire product suite, and then allocates them to each product according to demand.

In April, Telelogic acquired Popkin Software, and with it, that company's enterprise architecture and process-modeling tools. Those tools are not part of this release.

The company expects to ship the integrated products on June 17.