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Rational targets IT compliance needs, GM says

25.08.2006
Danny Sabbah, a 32-year veteran of IBM, has overseen the company's Rational software unit since May 2005. In an interview with Computerworld this week, he spoke about the increasing pressure on development organizations to implement mechanisms that can trace activities throughout the software development life cycle. Without such capabilities, users could fail audits for compliance with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Sabbah, Rational's general manager, also discussed the unit's new Eclipse-based project, code-named Jazz, which aims to link the various components of the software development life cycle and will eventually become a framework for future Rational products.

Excerpts from the interview follow:

What is Rational doing to meet corporate demand for tools that can link disparate development tools and include portfolio management capabilities? There was an era for a while focusing around client/server computing, around individual developer productivity. Those are necessary conditions, but at the end of the day, they are not sufficient conditions.

If you start looking at the pressures on software development in terms of compliance and flexibility and its ability to integrate and be managed as a business process, in many organizations you find that it's a mess. Some people are just trying to survive. They are failing audits in financial organizations because they can't show that the requirements that came in from the business analysts were traced and documented all the way through the development to deployment or running of code. When you multiply those problems with a development team that is geographically distributed, those problems are even more intense.

We have been trying to revamp our product portfolio to strengthen it along the lines of governance, geographically distributed development and compliance so it is auditable. Then developers don't have to worry about that. They can let the tools deal with it.

What types of changes have you made to address these issues? We introduced a bunch of enhancements to things like RequisitePro [a requirements management tool] for things like compliance. We now have a workflow and a process that manages quality, as opposed to just doing the automation of testing. We're using our products together and continuing to put in integration across our portfolio and our existing capabilities so they work together for end-to-end life-cycle traceability and ease of development. The traceability allows you to draw a path across the entire development life cycle that satisfies audits.