Borland Helps Joy Mining Machinery Streamline the Software Requirements Management Process
Borland® CaliberRM™provides leading supplier of mining machinery with ability to manage requirements process with greater efficiency, accuracy and consistency
Austin, Texas - févr 13, 2008 : Borland Software Corporation (NASDAQ: BORL, www.borland.com), the global leader in Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), today announced that Joy Mining Machinery has selected Borland® CaliberRM™ to streamline the requirements management process and facilitate more consistent and accurate documentation and validation of customers’ precise needs and expectations.
“Ambiguity in requirements can result in rework late in the design cycle, resulting in cost and delivery issues. We needed a way to ensure efficient and accurate requirements management to deliver the products our customers want and need, on time,” notes Chris Flynn, director of engineering systems for Joy Mining Machinery. “Borland’s requirement management solution provides the team with greater confidence that we’re delivering a quality end product that meets customers’ exact needs.”
Joy Mining Machinery, www.joy.com, is a global leader in the development, manufacture, distribution and service of underground mining machinery for the extraction of coal and other bedded materials. For over 80 years, Joy has been selling customized machines to meet the specific needs of their customers, the mining environment, and local regulatory requirements.
Joy’s customers can spend up to $50 million on a set of equipment. With such a significant investment, Joy’s customers expect the machines to meet their exact needs. When collaborating with customers, the team relied on manual documentation methods, such as Microsoft Word, to support the requirements definition and management process. This created a tedious and inconsistent process for data capture and inefficiencies in analysis, which increased the number of iterations Joy and their customers would go through during the requirements review process.
The complexity of mining equipment was also making manual techniques for capturing requirements and creating use cases especially difficult to manage. Since Joy’s diverse international customers often describe the same problem and requirement in different ways, accuracy and clarity were also key challenges.
After a thorough review of competitive products, Joy chose to implement Borland CaliberRM, a core component of Borland’s Requirements Definition and Management solution. Borland CaliberRM has provided Joy with a more accurate method to document and validate customer requirements. The product has also helped to streamline the requirements management process.
Borland CaliberRM has helped to reduce the “expectation gap” for Joy customers by facilitating the collection and creation of more detailed and accurate requirements that can be shared with all stakeholders. Borland CaliberRM provides the design team with a centralized repository to document customer expectations in a more accessible and useable way. The product allows over 100 users to deliver on key product features with greater precision and certainty. It has also helped Joy to more efficiently utilize global resources and reduce rework by providing all stakeholders with greater access during each stage of the requirements process.
The number of requirements reviews has also been greatly reduced using Borland CaliberRM. Requirements reviews have decreased from an average of 10 iterations down to 4 iterations per project – a 60 percent reduction – allowing the group to deliver products in a significantly shorter timeframe.
In addition, Borland CaliberRM’s end-to-end requirements traceability capabilities have provided Joy with detail on all changes for accurate timelines and better feedback to product developers. Joy benefits from greater speed and agility in the software requirements management process, and Joy’s customers benefit from shorter production cycles.
The traceability provided by Borland CaliberRM has also allowed Joy to confirm that each customer requirement has a validated test and each use case is the result of a documented requirement. This enables Joy to more easily estimate and implement requirements-based validation tests, reducing risk and improving product reliability and safety.
“We’ve seen an improvement in our ability to meet project deadlines, even exceed deadline expectations, but most importantly Borland CaliberRM provides us with documentation that now adds real value and clarity around customer needs, which drives project success,” says Flynn. “The tool helps us deliver safe, high-quality equipment that meets customer expectations through accurate requirements, efficient processes and comprehensive validation testing.”
About BorlandFounded in 1983, Borland (NASDAQ: BORL) is the leading vendor of Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions – open to customers’ processes, tools and platforms – providing the flexibility to manage, measure and improve the software delivery process. To learn more about maximizing the business value of software, visit http://www.borland.com.
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