Bipin A. Shah CEO & Chairman

Greetings again after my communication with all of you in the January Newsletter! We held a very successful webinar in January for the Agile Development methodology using the Kovair solution and the two presenters for the first time were from two continents outside the US – Asia and Australia. As always, all our webinars are recorded and available on our website www.kovair.com

This month, our participation in two events – The STeP-IN SUMMIT 2011 in Bangalore for Software Testing and the Pink Elephant event in Las Vegas for IT Service Management - ITSM Solutions is keeping us occupied.

This newsletter contains a wonderful write-up by one of our Sales and Business Directors, Mike Kalthoff, about the current management dilemma in having clear visibility in an increasingly complex software development environment with multiple tools and multiple locations and how the Kovair Omnibus Integration Solution can facilitate overcoming many such issues. Please take the time to read it.

In this Issue:

From the CEO Delivering Enterprise Visibility and Control Across All Development Tools and Platforms Upcoming Webinar Upcoming Tech Events New Publications Previous Webinar Brain Teaser

And last but not the least, our March 2 Webinar will focus on the Importance of Process in an IT Service Management Solution. We are bringing, for the first time, Josephine Smith, an executive from our customer – Northrop Grumman – who is well- experienced in setting up processes for the entire Help Desk or Service Management environment at a large corporation.
Happy reading!

Sincerely,
Bipin Shah
CEO and Chairman

Delivering Enterprise Visibility and Control Across All Development Tools and Platforms

Mike Kalthoff Director of Sales & Business Development Kovair Software

Software development today has grown in complexity, with an influx of outsourced development resources, multiple locations, tighter deadlines and a tremendous need for tight coordination between disparate groups. Add to this, management’s pressures to deliver high quality projects on time and under budget. The stakes are higher than ever before.
The more you grow your IT department, the more software development tools are introduced adding productivity to be sure, but also adding complexity to the mix. Most companies have a mix of old tools and new tools. Some are centrally located and some are spread out to multiple continents. This disconnected environment has resulted in islands of development databases, causing delayed projects and frustrated management.
Some companies attack this problem by attempting to write their own tool-database-to-tool-database integrations. These are fragile- they breakdown whenever new releases are issued, and their upkeep tends to be the low project on the totem pole due to higher priority tasks. Some tool vendors have developed their own integration or two. These also tend to be fragile and frequently incomplete.
What is needed is a robust, universal plug-and-play integration platform that can fully integrate nearly every development tool ever made on a local or global scale. No more hand export/import work, no more separate reports, and no more breaks in traceability between tools.
Introducing the Kovair Omnibus Tool Integration Platform: Omnibus is a powerful and easy to install middleware solution that handles the simplest integration problems and the most complex ones without asking IT to write a single line of code. Omnibus is built as an integration hub and works with individual tool adapters that simply make each tool’s database available to the Omnibus engine.
Each adapter uses Web Services to make all data communications seamless, no matter where in the world they are located. This unique architecture allows for all of the integration logic and controls to be located in the hub, giving the user administrator WYSIWYG access to all integration points. From field matching to event triggers to traceability flows to business process logic, it’s all there.
Each installation of the Kovair Omnibus also comes with a standard configuration for each tool to be integrated, so the integrations for requirements, test cases, code files, project files and documents are ready to go. And given the ease of administration, configuration changes can be made on the fly, again, without writing a single line of code.

You may access more information at http://www.kovair.com/downloads.aspx

New Publications

Kovair has published new case studies, brochures and whitepaper, listed as follows:

1. Requirements Management Case Study at Medha Servo Drives for High Reliability Systems
2. IT Service Management Case Study for Hexaware Technologies
3. Kovair ALM Studio: An Overview; Kovair ITSM Studio: An Overview
4. Kovair Omnibus for Integrated ALM: An Overview; and an Overview of the Kovair Agile Solution.

You may download them from http://www.kovair.com/downloads.aspx

Upcoming Tech Events

See you there!

Previous Webinar: ALM – The Agile Way with Kovair

This webinar will discuss and demonstrate the adoption of Agile methodology for ALM. Many ALM tools are constrained to one or possibly two development methodologies and/or frameworks. In the Agile implementation space, although the key concepts are somewhat consistent, the way they are implemented can vary. What is required is an ALM tool that allows for an Agile Team to manage a project or set of projects that can have:

• Agile Developers around the planet working across multiple projects
• Deliveries spread across multiple teams
• Agile Developers using various tools for managing, developing, testing and reporting across many projects that need to talk to each other and,
• Backlog shared across multiple projects requiring refactoring.

Add full traceability, advanced reporting across code, projects, backlogs, and alerts, and Kovair is a tool that can be easily configured to meet the needs of most Agile Teams and Projects.

• Complete Requirements Management solution
• Complete Test Management solution
• Complete Defect Management solution
• Release Management
• Risk Management
• Full cycle Manual & Automated Traceability from Requirements to Tests to Defects
• Best practice workflows for Requirements Review & Approval, Test Planning, Development, Test Execution and Defect Resolution
• Connected with developer tools - Developers get immediate access to Requirements, Test Cases and Defects from within their preferred IDE - Eclipse, IBM RAD or Microsoft Visual Studio
• Connected with testing tools - Testers build test scripts in tools like HP QuickTestPro and execute those automatically from the Test lab in Kovair studio
• Integrated Reporting & Dashboard of key project health and status – Requirements Coverage, Release Readiness, Quality Metrics, Defect Trends and others
• Embracing Change - facilitating proper change impact analysis and automated change propagation
• Supporting Globally distributed development  – enabling  real time collaboration and synchronization

There are 5 houses in 5 different colors in a row. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet. No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar, or drink the same beverage.
Other facts:

1. The Brit lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the immediate left of the white house.
5. The green house's owner drinks coffee.
6. The owner who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The owner living in the center house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The owner who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The owner who keeps the horse lives next to the one who smokes Dunhill.
12. The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The owner who smokes Blends lives next to the one who drinks water.
    
    
    The question is: WHO OWNS THE FISH?

Kovair will participate in the Online PMXPO on May 20th, 2010 for Project Management organized by Gantthead. Please join us on line at the Kovair booth where our representatives will show you new developments in ALM/SDLC tools integrations for achieving better Project performance. We will also showcase our new Project and Resource Management capabilities.

Please register in the URL http://www.gantthead.com/PMXPO2010/