Rob Cheng, director of developer solution at the Cupertino, Calif., company, said the new Borland LQM solution will mean that quality is tested for more frequently in the development process, from requirements through application delivery.

"It's an integrated quality solution that links business requirement through coding through testing and all the way through the software delivery cycle," Cheng said.

Indeed, the Borland LQM offering includes a set of best practices, skills training and integrated ALM (application lifecycle management) technology, the company said.

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Borland LQM supports requirements definition and management; test management and execution; architecture and design analysis; development test and defect prevention; automated functional testing; performance and scalability testing; and defect tracking and version control, the company said.

Borland announced its Gauntlet test and defect prevention system as part of its LQM solution. However, Gauntlet, which builds quality checks into development procedures, will not be available until later this year, the company said. Yet, Borland has an early-access preview version of Gauntlet, Cheng said.

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Borland LQM features Gauntlet's continuous build and testing environment, along with integration to Borland's ALM products, including the company's Silk testing products (SilkTest, SilkPerformer and SilkCentral Test Manager), its requirements definition and management products (CaliberRM and Caliber DefineIT), and software configuration management product (StarTeam), the company said.

Borland also offers process expertise and training. And the company helps enterprises apply the Borland LQM solution through Borland Accelerate, a system that evaluates a user organization's process maturity, the company said.

"No other vendor has this breadth," Cheng said. "This is something that's very unique to Borland," he said of the overall integration and variety included in the Borland approach.

"Many application development organizations overemphasize late-stage testing and tools," said Jim Duggan of Gartner in a research report targeted to chief information officers. "Since the earliest research into software quality, it has been apparent that a balanced approach that exploits people, processes and tools at several stages throughout the life cycle can achieve improved quality and predictability at the lowest overall cost."

"With more than 5 million subscribers relying on our services every day, it's imperative that our software is built to meet their needs," Barbara Tam, senior quality engineer at EarthLink, in Atlanta, said in a statement. "Borland's products enable our QA team to more effectively support Earthlink's enterprise quality initiatives and provide the best possible user experience for our customers. Here we push the mantra that software quality is everyone's responsibility, not just the responsibility of QA. It's exciting to see an innovator like Borland going a step further than others in the industry to make sure that mantra becomes the rule, rather than the exception."

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