Commentary: A more mature process

By Theresa Lanowitz, Gartner Analyst

The reporting and collaboration features of VA Linux's SourceForge Enterprise Edition will help managers gain better insight into application development projects done in highly distributed environments.

SourceForge Enterprise Edition concentrates on collaboration and reporting--two areas critical

	See news story: VA releases proprietary software version

for managers to gain insight into a project and for breaking down internal barriers in today's highly distributed application development organizations. The software assists in the integration of the product lifecycle across teams, code and documents. Thus, it can help IS organizations attempting to devise more mature application development processes.

SourceForge Enterprise Edition is an intranet-based, Web-enabled tool derived from SourceForge.Net, the open-source development site. It delivers a tool to integrate project life-cycle documentation and metrics on an intranet. Its new features include pervasive document search, monitoring and reporting, Oracle database integration and document management.

Features such as these provide information for members of a project team and their constituents. As enterprises call on application development organizations to boost return on investment and improve the maturity of their processes, reporting becomes crucial, especially for cross-functional teams. Reporting and community are critical in attacking software development "pain points:" loss of institutional and domain knowledge; managing a team distributed across multiple geographic boundaries; and duplicated efforts.

Application development organizations that need to eliminate or reduce overhead and to maintain highly distributed development environments should investigate SourceForge and should think of coupling it ultimately with hosted offerings such as Merant's ASAP and Borland Software's TeamSource.

(For a related commentary on Borland's TeamSource offering, see Gartner.com.)

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