Razor Tour Culminates in Newport, Rhode Island

NEWPORT, RI - December 12th, 2001 -- Visible Systems Corporation

Visible Systems Corporation today announced plans for Razor in the year 2002 that represents its ten-year anniversary. Ten years ago, an initiative to examine the development environment for General Electric's BSY-2 project had led to the original concept of Razor. Now, nearly 1,000 customers and ten years later, Razor has established itself as one the leading configuration management tools.

This year a series of focus sessions and end user group meetings were held with Lockheed Martin (Orlando, Florida), National Security Agency (Fort Meade, Maryland), Los Alamos National Laboratories (Los Alamos, New Mexico) and just recently with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) in Newport, RI. At each the conference, users described how Razor has enabled their organizations to deploy best CM practices and in some instances establish key practices within the Capability Mature Model (CMM) and ISO 9000 framework.

One of the highlights in the Newport conference was a report given by NUWC that prior to the implementation of a well defined process, developers spent 1% of their time dealing with accountability and 99% of their time in coding. Upon implementation of the process, developers spent 35% to 40% of their time dealing with accountability and 60% to 65% on coding. Ultimately upon automation of the process in Razor, developers are now spending 8% to 10% of their time dealing with accountability and 90% to 92% in design, coding, testing.

Through the automation of these processes in Razor, defects were identified earlier in the development life cycle as opposed to later. Based on local industry standards, the expected productivity improvements equate to a saving of 26 hours for each defect found. "This exemplifies the need to have both the tool and the process work together for the developer", explained Mr. Paul Masse who oversees the effort at NUWC. "By using Razor together with a well defined set of processes, our developers are better able to see the impact of changes during the detailed design and development phase vs. the system level testing phase. In addition to its highly customizable nature, our reasons for choosing Razor are its relatively modest price, brief learning curve and its multi-platform support" added Masse. Visible Systems Corporation also announced next year's plans for Razor that include new web-enabled features, more advanced Razor SCC features and more emphasis on Integrated Development Environments. “We are pleased with Razor's value proposition especially to our users who continue to see the value of Razor when used in conjunction with other development environments” explained Mike Cesino, General Manager of Configuration Management at Visible. “Users have reported that they are happy with their use of Razor in a number environments including Microsoft's Visual Studio, IBM's Visual Age, Telelogic's Tau UML Suite and OC System's PowerAda. We look forward to more of the same for next year as we concentrate on the integration of Razor with various Requirements Analysis and Automated Testing environments. All of these enhancements are designed to enable developers to focus on their projects by providing access to Razor directly from their chosen IDE. This enhances the development team's activities by offering consistency and ease-of-use across all development life cycle environments” added Cesino.

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Visible Systems Corporation

Visible Systems, headquartered in Waltham, MA, is a leader in application development and configuration management solutions, training, and consulting. Visible has over 100,000 users of its products worldwide. In additon, to Razor and Issue Weaver the company's products include: Visible Advantage, (a software engineering and repository product for complex, cross-functional enterprise class development.); Visible Analyst, (a powerful software analysis and design tool that supports UML, XML, round-trip, and structured software engineering); and Visible Developer (a model-based application design and development tool),

©2001 Visible Systems Corporation. All rights reserved. Razor is a registered trademark of Visible Systems. Other product and company names herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.