Set to unveil dashboard to measure whether projects are meeting expectations

Compuware Corp. is set to unveil a tool and a strategy that aims to ease some of the angst of IT managers struggling to deliver projects that meet user requirements on time and within budget. The company next week will announce that it is integrating its application life cycle management products, and that it has developed a new set of dashboards to measure how various activities like project management and quality assurance are performing compared with a list of requirements created at the beginning of the project.Â

The new Compuware Optimal line of integrated life cycle products was created to ensure that the requirements of the business are infused into all phases of the application development process, said Mike Burba, Compuware’s marketing director for application delivery management solutions. To that end, its DevPartner, OptimalJ, Optimal Trace and QACenter products will all be linked through the new Optimal Delivery Manager integrated dashboard, which will enable users to measure the effectiveness of the requirements management efforts.Â

“The intention is to give end-to-end life cycle visibility into all the projects going through an application delivery organization,” he said. “We are now automatically pushing metrics from each of those tools into an integrated dashboard. That means all the metrics on these dashboards use business requirements as the unit of measure.” The goal of tying the tools together with the dashboards, he added, is to help IT executives better grapple with the Achilles’ heel of development: building software that adequately meets end user requirements.Â

“Historically we have been horrible at delivering projects successfully,” Burba said. “IT executives are saying, ‘Lets figure out why we’re not doing this well and find out what we need to do to become more predictable. All they want is the ability to get better visibility into project status and project quality.”Â

Optimal Delivery Manager will be available June 15.