CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
10 September 2007
Implementation Investments
Borland Helps Jacobs Vehicle Systems Improve Efficiency with Integrated and Centralized Software Change and Configuration Management
Borland Software Corporation ( http://www.borland.com/ ), the global leader in Open Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), announced that Jacobs Vehicle Systems has implemented Borland® StarTeam® for integrated software change and configuration management (SCCM) and centralized control of project activities and digital assets. Borland StarTeam has helped the company speed the software build process and reduce rework by greatly improving efficiency, team communication and productivity.
Jacobs Vehicle Systems is recognized as the industry leader in developing and manufacturing commercial vehicle retarding systems. With more than 40 years experience in the business, Jacobs is known for its innovative business practices and modern manufacturing methods.
In order to offer the best service to their customers as well as maintain efficiency and optimize resources within their team, Jacobs looked to automate their SCCM process, which is used to maintain a base software code line for their electronics-based products and modified software code branches for each customer specific implementation. While the company had an existing configuration management tool, it lacked integrated change management capabilities. This left development teams having to cross-reference change requests with source code manually, which was inconsistent and prone to error.
The lack of an integrated SCCM system was also slowing down the build and release process and causing large amounts of rework. There was no effective way to isolate changes, reuse existing components or merge code updates from the baseline product to the software code branches for each customer specific implementation.
The company needed to centralize control and increase project visibility and collaboration across stakeholder roles to enable engineers to concurrently make changes to code without reintroducing previously fixed defects. The company also needed to improve the effectiveness of geographically distributed development through better support and access from remote locations.
"The lack of a centralized way to manage customer change requests created a lot of rework," said Ray Gosselin, senior software engineer at Jacobs Vehicle System. "Borland offered us the integrated change and configuration management solution that we were looking for, providing us with the ease-of-use and flexibility we require in an SCCM solution."
After evaluating solutions from multiple vendors, Jacobs Vehicle Systems chose to implement Borland StarTeam, a unified software change and configuration management offering and a core component of the Borland Change Management solution. Ease-of-use and low maintenance overhead were key selection criteria, as well as integrated change management.
Using the system, the team can now link change requests (CR) to source code changes, which gives the team direct visibility into all changes that go into a build. Prior to implementing Borland StarTeam, CR status was reported to customers through manually created version description documents. While these documents were accurate, they were static and aged as soon as they were created. With Borland StarTeam, the team can communicate real-time CR status to customers, which has improved customer care and loyalty. With instant, comprehensive access to change control status through custom reports generated from Borland StarTeam, change control board meetings are now well organized and productive, which helps drive better decision making.
Borland StarTeam has also helped to speed the build and release process and allowed Jacobs to optimize the resources of its team to meet customer requirements. With a centralized location for build components, Jacobs can create builds up to five times faster than with the previous system, which has greatly improved the team's efficiency.
"There are very few software tools in this industry that work consistently and reliably," continued Gosselin. "We are such a small group that we don't have the time to deal with problematic tools, which was why the Borland product was such a huge relief to us. Availability and uptime isn't a problem. Borland StarTeam allows us to focus on productivity and customer care."
About Borland StarTeam
Borland StarTeam is a fully integrated, cost-effective software change and configuration management tool designed for both centralized and geographically distributed software development environments. Borland StarTeam is a core product component of the company's Change Management solution, designed to allow development organizations to control, communicate and respond more effectively to rapidly changing business demands by delivering increased visibility and responsiveness, greater predictability and improved software applications and systems.
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