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CollabNet ups ALM Ante

CollabNet Corp.’s integration of the technologies it acquired last year from VA Software continues apace.

The Brisbane, Calif.-based maker of software lifecycle management tools recently released a new version of its SourceForge Enterprise application lifecycle management (ALM) system. The company also introduced a new desktop-configuration tool. Among other things, CollabNet’s new offerings sport a single interface to Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Eclipse IDEs.

CollabNet’s core platform is designed to connect geographically distributed software development teams and provide them with integrated tools. It’s also the corporate backer to the popular Subversion build- and change-management package.

The company has been integrating its core products with its assets acquired last year, says Rob Cheng, CollabNet’s director of product marketing. The result is SourceForge Enterprise 5.0, which offers a Web-based tool suite for software configuration management (SCM), issue tracking (which CollabNet calls artifact tracking), collaboration and product management.

Essentially, the suite centralizes the management of users, projects, processes and assets, Cheng says, with the aim of providing a high level of transparency that bumps up productivity and cuts costs. Because it’s all linked together, you have this very clear visibility and traceability into each release, Cheng says.

ALM Focus
There are two key improvements in SourceForge Enterprise 5.0 emphasizing ALM. The first is customizable project pages, which are designed to allow dev teams to capture and share workflows, best practices and other project content, the company says.

Project pages are flexible, portal-style project homepages where anybody who has access can create rich, nested Web pages that have within them portlet-like components that give you real-time data on the status of your project, Cheng explains.

The second ALM-focused feature in the system is the new product templates.

Once you’ve created these project pages that model what you want to do as a group, Cheng adds, you can capture that and save that entire structure — including the content, components that you want to deliver real-time data from, and the customized workflows and fields — all that information is captured as a template, which can then be used as a blueprint in future projects.

This enhanced project-templating functionality standardizes dev processes by capturing and re-using both the structure and the content of existing projects, Cheng says, from project pages and discussion forums to custom issue-tracker fields, saved searches and workflow definitions.

Source: reddevnews.com