Borland Software Corp. Monday announced three tools, scheduled for release in the fall, that are aimed at giving business users and IT managers a better view into application development processes.

The new products, which are the first members of a new Management Solutions family it's rolling out, are designed to be layered on top of Borland's application life-cycle management tools as well as rival ALM offerings from other vendors. Borland officials claimed that the combination can provide increased visibility into projects, potentially helping to eliminate problems that can lead to missed deadlines or budget overruns.

"The [application development] process itself is almost like a black box," said Rick Jackson, Borland's senior vice president of corporate strategy and chief marketing officer. "Things come out at the end, but usually it is past its due date, expenses are higher than they were supposed to be, and in some cases business users aren't happy."

The three tools being added today were all built using Borland's Open ALM framework, a set of bidirectional services that can link them to the ALM tools already in place at companies. Thus, businesses can continue using their existing tools while getting increased visibility into the development process, Jackson said.

One of the tools, called TeamDemand, is designed to give business users a window into the status of applications that are being built and development requests they've submitted, according to Jackson. He said TeamDemand can be linked directly with data on user requirements, development tasks and other ALM processes that may be stored in different repositories, giving users "a real-time tracking system" with a personalized view for monitoring the progress of IT projects.

And because the software provides such views, IT staffers can get out of the habit of generating manual reports to keep users updated, Jackson added.

Borland is also introducing TeamFocus, an enterprise project management tool that supports waterfall, agile and iterative development methods. Jackson said TeamFocus links directly into developer tools to monitor daily progress, then automatically creates reports that show IT and business managers "what the health of a particular project is." That can free them from having to set "intervention cycles" during projects to ask development teams for reports, he added.

The third new tool, called TeamAnalytics, is designed to add business intelligence to the ALM mix, via reporting tools, dashboards, analytics and an enterprise data warehouse for storing metrics related to application development processes. "To a CIO, this means we are arming them with an early warning system about how a project is progressing and where it may be headed," Jackson said.