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Application Development
Reasoning Automates Application Inspection Before QA
The latest innovation in the quest to improve software quality is the idea of using automated tools to inspect programs after they emerge from development but before they are submitted to quality assurance.
Reasoning Inc., a leader in automated software inspection services based in Mountain View, Calif., has recently unveiled the Illuma service, a new version and a renaming of its former Instant QA service. The company performs inspections of code at its own location, charging by the size of the program, and comparing its finds to a series of benchmarks compiled from the company's experience. Illuma is offered as a service in part because Reasoning's staff of experts needs to conduct all the inspections.
Defect data reports identify the locations of errors that could cause crashes or data corruption. The defect metrics reports, showing defects per thousand lines of code, enable customers to benchmark their own development efforts against industry, determine critical areas of the program for testing, and identify individual files with a high defect level.
Reasoning's customers include companies with the highest requirements for software quality, such as Agilent, Alcatel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NASA, Nortel, and Siemens. Today Reasoning inspects programs written in C and C++. Defects Illuma can detect include null pointer dereferences, memory leaks, out-of-bounds array accesses, uninitialized variables, and bad deallocations. Defect data and metrics reports are delivered to most clients within five days.
Jim Johnson, chairman of the Standish Group analyst firm, states, "With Reasoning's new defect metrics data, technology companies can direct testing in appropriate areas, determine more accurate release windows, and make an educated trade-off between risk and quality."
Says Bill Leavy, Reasoning's vice president of marketing, "It's getting harder for customers to release software on schedule. We inspect before the release of the application to quality assurance, so the application quality is higher at the test starting point and they [QA] can do their work faster. It's kind of like a medical scan."
Reasoning got its start in 1984, with the Refine platform for software analysis and transformation, which was used primarily by aerospace and computer companies. In 1996, the company transitioned to a service provider model by leveraging its core technology to uncover Y2K data detects. The company now has more than 80 companies as customers.
The latest version of the Illuma service adds three new metrics that allow customers to compare to other programs in the same category and be positioned within the top, middle, or bottom third. Another metric ranks the files according to defects per thousand lines, allowing QA to focus on those files with the highest defect rate, usually a small percentage of the total.
One customer recently ranked in the bottom third was found to have a highly defective module that was being propagated throughout the application.
Competitive alternatives to automated inspection are manual inspection, which is time-consuming and ties up senior programmers, and to some extent, debugging tools such as Purify from Rational and BoundsChecker from Compuware. Standards-consistency tools such as Code Wizard form Parasoft, and complexity analysis tools such as those from McCabe, are more complementary than competitive.
The average application Reasoning inspects ranges from 150,000 to 250,000 lines of code and costs 15 cents per line. A typical project costs approximately $40,000.
www.reasoning.com
Infrastructure & Operations
Precise Expanding Application Performance Management Reach
Precise Software Inc.'s acquisition of W. Quinn Associates Inc. of Reston, Va., extends the ability of the application performance management player by providing it with more insight into real-time, proactive storage utilization, which was WQuinn's strength. Precise acquired WQuinn for $20 million in cash and some stock.
Westwood, Mass.-based Precise aims to provide its customers a view of the IT infrastructure that enables the source of performance degradation to be pinpointed, especially application and database-related performance issues.
Precise initially built its business by analyzing performance issues related to applications using the Oracle database. It then extended the analysis into SAP applications, and later into EMC storage arrays. Today, the company's Insight product line covers DB2 as well as Oracle, and is scheduled to extend support to SQL Server in the first half of 2002.
The company now has 1,400 customers, including Nike, DoubleClick, and Amazon.com. The Quinn acquisition adds another 3,000 customers. Precise is No. 312 on Software Magazine's 2001 Software 500, with $27.5 million in 200 software and services revenues. The company is tracking to approximately double its revenues this year, says Andrew Bird, executive vice president of marketing.
Precise partners with many other infrastructure players including BEA, Tivoli, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Microsoft, and Sequent.
Precise packages its products within the i3 Suite, covering the Insight line for detection, the Indepth line for correction and the Inform line for communication. The Insight products measure response times of software components that make up a multitier application. The Insight line covers the Web, BEA Tuxedo, SAP R/3, Oracle, and J2EE application servers. The Indepth aims at optimizing the performance of important infrastructure database and middleware components. The line supports Oracle, DB2, J2EE application servers, and SAP R/3 and Oracle application servers. The Inform product line includes Precise/Pulse for monitoring and alerting and Precise/Foresight, a performance portal.
"We cover from the URL to SQL," says Bird.
Because the products provide visibility across different software domains, they help to bridge between different communities of users, namely CIOs, IT managers, IT staff in database and application areas, and the end-user community.
Typical performance problems Precise is seeing today include lack of free space on disk drives housing databases, due to companies increasing the size of databases and adding more data files. "If the drive loses too much free space and it runs the database index as well as the data files on the same spindle, too much thrashing can result," says Thomas Murphy, director of commercial products for Precise.
Another trend is the absence of production experience with Java-based applications on the part of IT. "There is no Java application administrator," says Murphy, but such a role is needed to provide a home for the administrative responsibilities associated with Java applications. "If there is a production problem with the Java application, the production people don't have the information they need to solve it, so they have to go back to the development group. There is a gap."
Precise recently reached an agreement with Siebel Software to provide more insight into running Siebel CRM applications. The company will be offering a solution tailored for Siebel.
The i3 suite ranges in price from approximately $60,000 for an NT to $500,000 per business process server. The price varies depending on the number of servers supported.
Also, the company is beginning to win business from companies interested in relating the behavior of Web site visitors to how the Web site performs. Dell Computer is interested in making this association, so Precise has a project underway to provide a correlation.
www.precise.com
Customer Focus
RightNow's Web eService Center 5.0 Boosts Customer Self-Service
With the 5.0 release of Web eService Center, RightNow Technologies of Bozeman, Mont., adds support for over 15 languages and introduces "SmartSense," which monitors customer communications for emotional content, such as anger.
"You can create business rules that take into account the feelings of customers," says Greg Gianforte, CEO and founder of RightNow.
Founded in 1998 and with 1,200 corporate clients today, RightNow offers its Internet-based customer service solution on an application service provider (ASP) basis. The product provides for customer self-service, e-mail management, live chat, incident tracking, and customer satisfaction measurement. Information is delivered across multiple channels that are driven by a self-learning knowledge base.
The product's recognition learning style, as opposed to a recall learning style, is popular with customers, Gianforte says. The technique supports the grouping of words that customers use into affinity groups, which are then ordered into a hierarchy. "The historically most-useful buckets are put at the top of the tree," Gianforte says. Case-based reasoning approaches, he suggests, are more brittle because they must be manually constructed. The RightNow product is dynamic, changing as the software learns from customer behavior.
In a recent study performed by Doculabs of Chicago on the financial impact of Web-based self-service compared to other CRM channels, a study based on data provided by RightNow, the Web-based alternative was found to deliver high return on investment. In Q1 of 2001, based on 3.7 million customer service requests made to over 200 companies, cumulative savings exceeded $100 million, compared to the cost of having customer service staff respond to inquiries. The average cost per deployed response using the self-service model was found to be $1.17, compared to a $32.74 average cost per response by a live call center operator. "For the 200 companies studied, we are able to achieve an 86% self-service rate," says Gianforte.
RightNow generates less than 10% of its revenue from professional services, because the product can be configured out of the box to most customers needs. The product complements solutions from Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft, with several customers using both. The privately held company had $26 million in sales last year, all two-year contracts for which is recognized $11 million in revenue.
The SmartSense feature is based on linguistic analysis and is aimed at improving customer satisfaction, another emphasis of the product set. Every service interaction is followed the next day by a customer satisfaction survey. If a customer indicates he or she was not satisfied, an e-mail goes to the customer service area and that customer is likely to be contacted directly. "Studies have shown that if you make a dissatisfied customer a satisfied customer, they are more loyal than if they were never dissatisfied," Gianforte says.
The 5.0 release also adds enhanced live collaboration. With this feature, for example, a customer service representative at a RightNow client site can take over for a customer who might be confused about how to fill out an online form.
Pricing for Web eService Center 5.0 is based on the number people on the call center support team and the volume of transactions. Five people in the customer support area would pay a starting price of $30,000 for two years. If a company had 300 people in the call center and Web eService is the only application, the cost could be over $1 million for two years. RightNow hosts the application and provides all the support.
www.rightnow.com
E-Business Readiness
Merant Extends NetObjects Buy with PVCS Content Manager 2.0
With the release of PVCS Content Manager 2.0, Merant seeks to address both enterprise and departmental content management requirements for Web applications by combining out-of-the-box ease of use with enterprise-strength features and functions.
The product is an evolution of the Collage product Merant acquired from NetObjects last February for $18 million in cash. IBM was an early investor in NetObjects and IBM Global Services is a user of the product. That product was second or third generation at the time of the acquisition, having been first released in 1999. "We learned we needed some real expertise in Web content management," says Andrew Weiss, CTO of Merant, commenting on the acquisition, which included developers as well as source code. The transition from source code management to Web content management using the same code base is difficult to achieve, he says. "There are some similarities, but some differences that are quite important."
Philosophically, the College product was on a path to empower content contributors through ease of use, a path that Merant has worked to extend. The product is tightly integrated with IBM's WebSphere but it ships with Tomcat, the J2EE-compliant application server from the Apache Group.
Content contributors can use the tool of their choice, such as Microsoft Office or FrontPage or Macromedia's Dreamweaver, while working within the Content Manager environment. The product complies with the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) standard, which Merant has helped to evolve along with IBM, Adobe, and others.
The product's ease of use is enhanced by a set of packaged application engines, or management processes, that define a workflow or automate a business process. These can be changed or modified. The Web-based thin-client architecture makes the product easy to deploy to clients. A Web site import facility enables a custom-built site to come under the management of Content Manager efficiently.
Customers of PVCS Content Manager 2.0 include Allfirst Bank, which needed a content management tool to support a team of developers working from different locations. The prebuilt design and runtime components of the product appealed to the company, says Erik Steensen, senior Internet engineer for Allfirst.
For companies using the PVCS Dimensions product for source code control, the repositories of Content Manager and Dimensions can be linked to share information. "If you change the Web page, you will have references in the repository and vice versa," Weiss says.
The Team Edition of PVCS Content Manager, with licenses for five users and creation and management support, is priced at $30,000. That version does not include the application engines and support for distributed deployment. Those are supported in the Enterprise Edition, for an unlimited number of users, with pricing starting at $90,000. The price goes up as the number of servers supported increases. Merant has U.S. headquarters in Rockville, Md.
www.merant.com
