Daligning Software Configuration Tool And Process Is A Must For Early Problem Detection!

NEWPORT, RI - January 15th, 2002 -- Visible Systems Corporation

At Visible Systems' recent Software Configuration Management (SCM) user conference for its Razor customers, one organization reported that software quality and timely development depended on both the process and the tool working together.

A presentation by the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) of Newport, RI, reported that prior to the implementation of a well-defined process, its developers spent 1% of their time dealing with accountability and 99% of their time in coding. On implementation of the process, developers spent 35% to 40% of their time dealing with accountability and 60% to 65% on coding. After automating the process in the Razor SCM tool, developers are spending 8% to 10% of their time dealing with accountability and 90% to 92% in design, coding, and testing.

"By automating these processes in Razor, defects were identified earlier in the development lifecycle," explained Paul Masse, who oversees the quality improvement effort at NUWC. "Based on local industry standards, 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," Masse said. "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 instead of in the system-level testing phase. We chose Razor because it is highly customizable, modestly priced, has a brief learning curve, and supports multiple platforms."

Other User Conferences . Lockheed Martin (Orlando, Florida), National Security Agency (Fort Meade, Maryland), and Los Alamos National Laboratories (Los Alamos, New Mexico) were among the organizations that have participated in Visible Systems user discussions held throughout the year. Each organization described how Razor has enabled their development teams to deploy best configuration management practices and, in several cases, to establish key practices within the Capability Mature Model (CMM) and ISO 9000 framework.

As conference host, Visible Systems Corporation announced development plans for Razor in 2002, which include new Web-enabled features, more advanced Razor SCC features, and more emphasis on Integrated Development Environments. "We are pleased to hear about our users' successes in using Razor in a variety of development environments," explained Mike Cesino, General Manager of Software Configuration Management at Visible. "Users have reported good value in their use of Razor within a environments such as Microsoft's Visual Studio, IBM's Visual Age, Telelogic's Tau UML Suite, and OC System's PowerAda. We expect more of the same for next year as we integrate Razor with various Requirements Analysis and Automated Testing environments. Providing developers with access to Razor directly from their chosen IDE gives the development team consistency and ease-of-use across all development life cycle environments."

About Razor . Version control tracks the "who," "what," "when," "how," and "why" of every file and release. Razor 4.3 logs and reports on every detail of each software project, giving project managers full accountability and enforcement of the development process. Problem and issue tracking - tightly integrated with version control, process control, and release management - organizes the submission, assignment, and resolution of development issues as they arise. Managers can conform Razor's problem tracking feature to their organization's processes and specify event triggers to notify project members of predefined actions, such as missed deadline or incomplete tasks or inaction on an item.

Release management saves developers hours of search and build time by organizing all tested and approved files of software releases. As a result, developers can build new releases on a bug-free base of existing files. Release management not only aids in the reproducibility of new builds but also facilitates troubleshooting. Process control gives the user standard procedures for organizing software tracking.

Razor 4.3 also takes advantage of security features, significantly decreasing the threat of information compromise by providing one of the highest levels of encryption for remote data transfer. It also provides embedded functions within all popular integrated development environments, giving developers a seamless interface to the Microsoft Visual Studio suite of products, including Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro and Visual C++; as well as IBM's Visual Age for Java developers and PowerBuilder for RAD (rapid application development) of client/server, Web, and n-tier applications.

Visible Systems Corporation

Visible Systems Corporation, headquartered in Waltham, MA, is a leader in application development tools, training, and consulting. Besides Razor and Issue Weaver, the company' s products include Visible Analyst, a repository-based data, process, and UML modeling product, and Visible Developer, a business application design and development tool.

©2002 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.