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Concerto Data Sheets:
Increase Productivity and Reliability of Your Development Team with Parasoft Concerto
Parasoft Concerto is a suite of server-side tools that help you plan, track progress and optimize your software projects. Additionally, Concerto helps you implement best practices, control code quality, as well as build and test your final product.
Concerto’s goal is to increase productivity and improve reliability of your software development teams. Concerto consists of the following products:
- Project Center to manage software projects.
- Report Center to data mine from multiple sources, and provide project reports.
- Team Server to share various project-related artifacts among team members.
- License Server to help manage other Parasoft products licenses, as well as watch and control adoption of tools usage among developers.
Unlike general project management products, Concerto’s Project Center is heavily oriented toward software development with a clear distinction of software development artifacts, such as requirements, unit tests, feature requests, code reviews, bug reports, test suites, and so on.
As described in “Automated Defect Prevention–Best Practices in Software Management” written by Dorota Huizinga and Adam Kolawa, Concerto helps you find problem areas in your code and processes, provides details to pin-point their root causes, and then monitors improvements—enabling development teams to deliver new projects in less time with existing resources. Concerto encapsulates Parasoft’s 20 years of experience in software error prevention.
How Concerto Fits into Existing Infrastructure
Unlike other products, Concerto does not try to replace your existing software development infrastructure. Rather, it integrates with its elements: source control, bug tracking and requirements management systems, as well as your Parasoft testing solutions and third party tools.
Concerto correlates data from these sources to provide comprehensive and objective insight into application quality, team productivity, and project risk factors—helping you to make informed decisions about project scheduling, resource allocation and results readiness. To draw maximum benefits of Concerto from a project management perspective, it is highly recommended to use its task distribution capabilities.
Boost Productivity through Process Improvement
Concerto allows you to address key reasons for the failure of software development projects, whether it be incomplete planning, features creeping, or poor quality. With the comprehensive metrics that Concerto provides, you can track productivity, identify what parts of your process could be improved to increase productivity, check whether your team is following process improvement measures, and monitor the impact of such measures on productivity.
Better Planning and Status Tracking–“Understand the Past and Present to Make Decisions about the Future
Incorrect planning often comes from a project leader—a senior developer who lacks general project management background. Having development background is not enough, if the person planning does not understand the activities that a software development team spends time on, in depth.
Important questions for which to find answers:
- How much time does it take to produce new code?
- How much time is spent fixing bugs?
Concerto tracks tasks related to requirements implementation versus bug fixes. It also tracks acceptance testing and any others activities, such as infrastructure improvements. With Concerto, it is easy to analyze statistical data about the past projects, and then draw conclusions to help properly plan for the future, and improve the process. For example, someone may find that there are typically five tasks creeping into a project per month. This must be taken into account when planning, or it may be beneficial to devote more time and money for better testing to reduce the time spent on post-release bug fixes.
Concerto shows time spent on each of those activities. It also automatically shows actual completion time versus planned time for both the entire project and individual tasks. Additionally, Concerto synchronizes with MS Project, making it easy to apply the most widely known project planning tool to better estimate time required for project completion.
Click on "Demo" areas on the graph below to watch short demo video, explaining how each part of the Project Center works in practice. Click on "Help" areas to read about given functionality.
Higher Reliability with Best Development Practices
Software development team reliability has two meanings: 1) Your team delivers on time; 2) Your team delivers high-quality products.
No matter what your primary concern, good regression test suites help to greatly improve your development team reliability. Without a comprehensive regression test suite that is run daily, it is impossible to know whether your product works. No planning or progress tracking is of value if the result is a product that does not work.
For a more holistic assessment of a project, it is critical to keep close tabs on requirements, design, and build issues that can significantly impact product quality and readiness. That is why Concerto's dashboards provide instant alerts about emerging problems across all aspects of your project. You can drill down to identify the root cause of problems, so that they can be removed to prevent future occurrences of the same problem.
With all the data tracking that it does, Concerto is able to evaluate the progress of each element that comprises a project, and each best development practice that you want your team to adhere to. At a glance, you can see whether each element is progressing as it should, for instance, looking at coding standards, you can tell right away that the number of exposed violations is decreasing because of the positive trend in development. At the same time the Code Reviews graph shows that the team is consistent with its efforts to perform manual code inspections.
Manual Acceptance Testing Made Easier
No matter what level of automation your testing infrastructure has, at the end virtually every application must undergo manual acceptance tests. No machine can replace a human in this role. However infrastructure for such activity can be computer aided. Concerto provides simple yet powerful manual tests management capabilities. Testers can create and manage testing scenarios, group them in suites, create and plan testing sessions, plan for retest, and finally replay step by step instructions to fulfill given tests. That alone takes important portion of burden of repeatable and mundane tasks out of tester's shoulders. But concerto goes even further allowing developers to easily help testers by easily providing them with test scenarios describing how given feature was supposed to work.
Change-based Testing
In environments where testing is particularly time consuming and costly, it is important to properly prioritize testing tasks. Concerto helps by relating code changes to requirements and actual test cases. By doing so, changes in code can easily be mapped to the affected requirements and test suites that need to be run. Whenever possible, automated tests can be created and related to requirements so that code changes can automatically trigger the appropriate tests. Focusing testing efforts based on code changes reduces overall testing time and cost.
Make Everyone's Life Easier.
Concerto is all about making the lives of development teams easier. Streamlining work distribution, automating progress reporting, learning from past experience, automating tests and code inspection, and change best testing are among the numerous elements that make up the ADP methodology. All of these elements aim to make software project management more productive, more reliable, and more fun for the participants by eliminating mundane tasks and allowing teams to focus on the most rewarding part: creating new functionality.
“Automated Defect Prevention” by Dorota Huizinga and Adam Kolawa
“Automated Defect Prevention” (ADP) is a book that describes an approach to software management based on establishing an infrastructure that serves as the foundation of a project. This infrastructure defines roles, necessary technology, and interactions between people and technology. It automates repetitive tasks, organizes project activities, tracks project status, and seamlessly collects project data to provide measures necessary for decision making.
Most importantly, this infrastructure sustains and facilitates the improvement of human-defined processes. The methodology described “Automated Defect Prevention” stands out from the current software landscape as a result of two unique features: its comprehensive approach to defect prevention, and its far-reaching emphasis on automation.
Features
Work Planning and Tracking
- Provides an easy-to-use and robust task management system.
- Delivers tasks right to your Eclipse or compatible IDE, through web interface or email.
- Automates progress reporting by developers.
- Correlates tasks with requirements, bug fixes, code changes and test results.
- Supports iterative methodologies, such as SCRUM.
- Provides at-a-glance assessment to determine whether iterations are within planned time frame.
Acceptance Testing
- Provides simple, yet powerful manual tests management system.
- Provides step-by-step testing scenarios.
- Provides easy insight into what, when and by whom feature was tested—with re-test capabilities.
- Prioritizes tests based on relevant code changes (change-based testing).
Reporting and Analytics
- Runs in the background and automatically reports based on your existing process.
- Correlates and presents key software development data in one place; data such as, code changes, test results, software metrics, software defects, feature requests, bug reports, requirements and so on.
- Ensures software development policy compliance with rich set of reports.
- Provides data mining through extensive drill-down capabilities.
- Provides configurable dashboards.
- Provides reports available in XML—ready to integrate into corporate portals.
Workflow Automation
- Simplifies team-wide sharing of test configurations and coding standards.
- Delivers detected defects to the relevant code author.
- Enables effective code inspections.
Existing Infrastructure Integration
- Integrates with all major code repositories, bug tracking systems, requirement management systems and build systems.
- Integrates fully with Eclipse and Mylyn.
- Integrates with MS Project.
- Integrates tightly with other Parasoft products, including Jtest, C++test, .TEST, SOAtest, and WebKing.
Benefits
- Gathers all important SDLC data from various existing sources into one place, providing clear visibility into trends and behaviors.
- Helps to drive adoption of development best practices or corporate standards.
- Allows to greatly increase development team maturity, productivity and reliability.
- Supports CMMI implementation, as well as Agile methodologies (such as, SCRUM) or ADP approach (www.adpqb.org).
- Streamlines development workflow by automating task distribution and practically eliminating reporting on progress.
- Provides at-a-glance visibility of project progress to Project Managers—eliminating necessity to open and update MS Project files.
- Updates MS Project files pertaining to project progress automatically (if necessary).Stores historical data in each task, including time spent, code changes and tests ran.
- Allows analysis of activities that take the most amount of time to determine where efficiency can be increased.
- Reduces the risk of organizational “memory loss”.
- Enables developers to provide basic test scenarios to QA—eliminating misunderstandings regarding the implementation of given functionality.
- Simplifies manual acceptance testing reducing needless bureaucracy.
- Enables QA teams to focuses on testing only affected functionality (change-based testing).
SDLC components supported by Concerto
Platforms
Source repositories
- AccuRev, Borland StarTeam, CVS, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, MKS Source Integrity, Perforce P4 IBM ClearCase, Serena Dimensions, Serena Version Manager (PVCS) CLI and PCLI, Subversion, Telelogic CM Synergy
Bug tracking systems
- Bugzilla, IBM ClearQuest, Altassian Jira, HP Quality Center (former Mercury Test Director)
- Any system capable of producing files in CSV format
Requirement management
- Import from Excel , Doors, IBM Rational RequisitePro or other systems through CSV format
Build systems
- Makefile (C/C++), Ant, Maven
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