Compuware, Parasoft, and AutomatedQA this week plan to offer products to improve software development processes, with Compuware focused on quality assurance, Parasoft on SOA testing, and AutomatedQA on build and release management.

The Compuware Quality Management product, for managing quality processes, fills a gap between the company's QACenter software for test management and its CARS (Compuware Application Reliability Solution) package for "quality governance."

"About 20 percent of the market is ready for this quality governance solution that we have in CARS but the rest of the 80 percent of the market is really stuck at the test management [level]," said Mike Burba, Compuware marketing director for application delivery solutions. "It's a bridge too far to go to CARS," he said.

Quality Management has the capabilities of QACenter plus a Web-based portal and built-in management reports for viewing projects. Featured is a centralized dashboard for testing teams to monitor quality goals. Performance indicators are featured.

Also, Quality Management dashboards offer visibility into application quality from requirements to delivery, the company said. Business requirements are traced and effectiveness of testing projects is measured. A cross-project reporting capability helps determine effectiveness of quality processes over time.

A visual workflow enables organizations to implement quality processes consistently. Quality Management features Compuware's QualityPoint methodology for software quality assurance. The Quality Optimizer capability in Quality Management lets teams develop "what if" scenarios to balance risk, cost, and schedule.

CARS, meanwhile, helps users adopt a more mature quality practice that represents an end-to-end lifecycle approach to quality assurance, Burba said. It features capabilities such as requirements definition and management as well as code quality tools and testing.

Did Compuware really need a product between QACenter and CARS? An industry analyst, Thomas Murphy, research director at Gartner, said Quality Management fills a need for smaller enterprises (those with fewer than 10,000 employees).

"Whether it's product overkill or not, I guess what you could say is obviously that [this] shows CARS in and of itself may be too much for a lot of companies to bite off all at once and they need other ways to have entry into the market," Murphy said.

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