May 30, 2005
(Computerworld)
LAS VEGAS -- IBM last week brought out new software designed to bridge the gap between development and IT operations by more closely linking its Rational testing and development tools with the Tivoli application management software.
The company unveiled two new tool kits -- which executives said can automatically identity and help repair problems in business applications -- at the Rational Software Development Conference here. The tools aim to shorten the cycle time for developers to identify and repair problems with applications by linking performance issues to development tools.
The new IBM Problem Resolution Toolkit will allow developers to access information stored by Tivoli about performance or quality issues to quickly isolate the cause and minimize downtime, IBM executives said. The IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit can identify problems in testing and suggest probable causes and resolutions, they said.
"We're taking the information that is being captured through monitoring and metering [in Tivoli] ... and allowing for instances of that metadata around a particular situation to flow from operations to the development products," said Daniel Sabbah, general manager of the Rational software unit in IBM's software group.
Joshua Barnes, a consultant at Ajilon Consulting, is working with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida in Jacksonville on a three-year project to roll out Rational's testing and requirements management tools to the health care organization's 1,500-member IT shop.
The Problem Resolution Toolkit will help Blue Cross address problems with transactions more quickly, he said.
"You will be able to go from weeks to re-create a development environment for a transaction that has a problem to hours," he said. "If it was processing a claim, there are so many variables ... to try to re-create and find a bottleneck would be a very lengthy process."
Melissa Webster, an analyst at IDC, said that it makes sense for IBM to build off the existing investments its customers have made in Tivoli products and tie those directly into the development environment.
"Helping performance teams come together, collaborate and share information can really dramatically shorten the time to problem resolution and time to a fix," she said.
IBM also announced new capabilities in its software quality tools that increase productivity and extend support to applications from Siebel Systems Inc.
IBM added runtime analysis and reporting capabilities to its Rational Performance Tester designed to more accurately identify problems during the testing process. In addition, the performance-testing tool now will provide HTML rendering capabilities to allow testers to view Web pages they are testing instead of just viewing the code.
The Rational Functional Tester Extension for Siebel Systems Inc.'s Test Automation interfaces will allow users deploying Siebel 7.7 to verify that these applications will perform correctly, according to IBM.