Borland beefs up its development support

By Alun Williams

Posted on 10 Oct 2002 at 11:23

Borland has bought software development company Starbase, whose products support project specification, version handling and bug tracking. The tools help throughout the development lifecycle from initial design to final testing and deployment.

'We believe time-to-market demands will continue to compress the development process, making integrated solutions paramount,' said Dale L. Fuller, president and CEO of Borland. 'The acquisition of Starbase advances our goal of integrating all phases of software development into a single, seamless solution that unifies the design, development, testing, and deployment phases of the software application lifecycle.'

Borland's aim is to speed the time to market for programmers. 'We are strengthening Borland's ability to provide customers with platform-independent technologies that maximise team productivity, ensure higher-quality code, and reduce total cost of ownership,' added Fuller.

The deal is worth approximately $24m, or $2.75 per Starbase share, and Borland will be 'bridge financing' Starbase to the tune of $2m until the transaction is completed.

The modern trend has long been towards large-scale integrated development environments (IDEs), which increasingly resemble big and baggy monsters. Support for modelling, bug tracking, build controls and versioning must all be within easy reach of the tool that the programmer uses to actually write and compile his code.

The dominant environment in this field is still Microsoft's Visual Studio.

Borland has been targeting enterprise-scale development and the Starbase products are a neat fit. Any serious large-scale project should, for example, be using some form of version control. While a lone programmer may be able to keep track of individual fixes and workarounds inside their head, this becomes untenable for groups of developers.