Executive Corner
The world’s reliance on software to drive businesses of all sizes has placed tremendous challenges on software development organizations in almost every industry. These teams face continuous pressure to deliver software faster and with less overall cost to their business. Highly distributed software development organizations and the growing complexity of IT environments only compounds this pressure. Far too often, in the race to deliver software on time and within budget, it is product quality that is negatively impacted.
This does not have to be the case. Virtualization technologies can be used to deliver a more efficient, less costly approach to ensuring software quality. Application development teams and test teams can leverage virtual lab environments to reduce test equipment costs, slash test cycle times and improve the quality of the software they deliver.
Virtual lab environments help address the immense challenge quality assurance teams face due to the time and cost constraints of provisioning and maintaining the many separate, physical systems required to to fully test applications across multiple platforms and configurations. By leveraging virtual lab environments, QA teams are able to provision even the most complex development and test environments in minutes, rather than days, and shave significant time off software development cycles through rapid, automated setup and teardown.
However, unless an efficient approach to the software testing process is in place, testing can become a serious bottleneck to the overall application development timeline – even in a virtualized environment. The integration of virtual lab environments into the software testing process is critical to overcoming this challenge.
Our partnership with VMware addresses this challenge through the integration of Borland® SilkCentral® Test Manager™ 2007 with VMware® Lab Manager. The integration extends test management reach and coverage with seamless access to virtualized test environments in VMware Lab Manager.
Borland is leveraging the deep integration between these products today at our Enterprise Quality Center (EQC) in Singapore. The EQC is designed to prepare all Borland products for “enterprise readiness” – supporting all quality assurance activities across Borland’s globally distributed development organizations. A significant factor in the success of the EQC is the seamless integration between Borland SilkCentral Test Manager and VMware Lab Manager. This enables our development organizations to test more efficiently, across a wider range of environments and with greater test coverage – ultimately improving software product quality across multiple configurations and platforms.
The adoption of a process that synergizes virtual lab environments with test management has the potential to dramatically impact the way global organizations test and ensure software quality – at a fraction of the cost of traditional approaches. Borland is excited to be able to deliver these powerful benefits to our customers through our technologies and partnerships.
Best regards,
Pete Morowski
Senior Vice President of Research and Development
Borland Software