With Gauntlet, Borland is promoting the use of builds as an opportunity for test execution early in the development lifecycle, said analyst Carey Schwaber of Forrester Research. "The benefit of that is you find out about defects before you even get to a discrete testing phase," Schwaber said.

Borland's use of build management in Gauntlet is cutting-edge, although an open source tool such as CruiseControl can perform some of the same functions, she said. Gauntlet is intended to increase attention on one of the biggest pain points in the development lifecycle, which is making the system work together as a whole, Schwaber said.

Testing capabilities in the initial version of Gauntlet are tuned to Java development, although developers writing in .Net languages still could use it for managing check-ins and building software. Support for testing other languages besides Java will be added in the future. Citing the differences between scripting languages and compiled languages, Borland has no plans to add capabilities tuned to dynamic languages such as Perl or PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor). "These are scripting languages, so they're not compiled," Cheng said.

Gauntlet also embraces open source development methodologies, which are more transparent and open, said Cheng. But there are no plans to actually open-source any of the Gauntlet technology itself.

Borland's future relationship with developers, Cheng stressed, is a server-side relationship as opposed to working with them via client products, Cheng said.