HP announced the availability of new ALM tooling: IT Performance Suite VP of Apps Edition and Application Lifecycle Intelligence. These offerings are focused on enterprise managers in charge of applications across an organization.

At the heart of these offerings are new integrations with third-party SCM and build management tools. Jonathan Rende, vice president and general manager of IT Performance Suite Application Transformation Solutions at HP Software, said that HP has come to realize that its ALM solutions have to work alongside existing popular tools, such as Eclipse, Hudson and Subversion. But just integrating with these tools is not enough.

“Developers like to work in their own world,” said Rende. “They work in Eclipse or Visual Studio, they use their own build products and their own source-control products, none of which we provide.  What we’ve created with Application Lifecycle Intelligence is a way to automatically plug into all three of those worlds together so developers can keep working how they need to, check in and check out code, and run builds, all seamlessly included in our application life-cycle management product.

“If I check in a line and check it out, now I’ll know if this is connected to a defect or a requirement. Every time source code is checked in, we’re linking it to real tasks that matter for requirements and defects.”

With all those integrations tying code to actual documented requirements and defects, the IT Performance Suite VP of Apps Edition is designed to plug a manager into that constant stream of information through a new dashboard that tracks all of the activity taking place in those now-integrated IDEs, build systems and SCM systems.

Rende said that through plug-ins to all of its newly supported third-party application development tools, HP is able to automatically pull in the information it needs to track the status of a project. The new Application Lifecycle Intelligence suite knows when code is checked in or out of SCM, and when new requirements or defects are added, and it gives managers a unified location to track all of this information.

“This is the Holy Grail for any environment that customers are using,” said Rende. “While others have made these promises in the past, they’ve done it for their own stacks. They’ve never done it in a heterogeneous way. We’re saying keep using what you’re using.”

The IDE, SCM system and build tools for Application Lifecycle Intelligence are available as an upgrade to HP Quality Center.