Parasoft Concerto for Agile Development Management

Parasoft Concerto for Application Life Cycle Management

For the full transcript of the excerpt please see the following: Software Development Management by Adam Kolawa.

Parasoft has been developing software for more than 20 years. During this time, we have come to understand that there is no silver bullet for the creation and maintenance of software. Although we are great proponents of automation and analysis, we are the first to admit that there is no single tool, technology, or technique that can, on its own, improve productivity, guarantee quality, and ensure that project deadlines are met.

Over the years, Parasoft explored many different tools and technologies that held promise for improving code, application, or project quality. Parasoft’s research and development not only explored these options from an internal productivity perspective, but also from the business value perspective—given our history of selling development organizations tools that assist in preventing software defects.

Our bottom line was that if we could not find a way for our own team to adopt a specific technique or technology as a process, then we deemed it superfluous and moved on. More importantly, we discovered that the “good” practices transcend methodology. It does not matter if you declare your process to be waterfall, agile, or iterative. The common denominator is that developers must write code and technology must complement the individual. It must be non-intrusive, automated, and follow the human workflow.

Personally, given our industry’s appetite for technology, I’m a bit amazed that software development organizations have not adopted tighter, more disciplined processes leveraging the available automation. However, we have reached an inflection point in the business of developing software: a point where there is a distinct need for greater productivity and a sense of urgency for better software quality.

In 2009, Parasoft released Parasoft Concerto. I feel that Parasoft Concerto is an optimal combination of tools, processes, and infrastructure that can increase development productivity by orders of magnitude. We refer to this category of development infrastructure as Software Development Management (SDM). In the remainder of this document, I’d like to highlight how the Parasoft Concerto SDM solution assists to increase productivity throughout the SDLC.