DevPartner or Business Investement

I’m writing a new product review on DevPartner from Compuware, and have been working with it for about a week now (14 day trial installation).  It’s a pretty nifty product (obviously a convergence of a number of tools that Compuware has acquired over the years).  I’m a big believer in this kind of software.  Essentially, the tool provides:

·         Code coverage analysis

·         Static code analysis

·         Distributed application analysis

·         Error detection

·         Memory analysis

·         Performance analysis

No matter how good of a developer you or your team is, there is still a lot of ways of coding “smarter”.  Besides, not every team developing business solutions can have a development “GOD” on their team – who also has the time to read over and review every single line of code your entire team writes.  Using a toolset such as DevPartner can help you catch mistakes, or other less threatening issues, early in your development process. And, as we all know, catching bad things up front is a whole lot cheaper than trying to fix them after you hit production. 

The product looks solid, but when I looked at the price – I almost fell over.  I’ve worked on a number of large projects and I can truly appreciate the business case for the tool – but for much less money can I get the majority of the features from FXCop + CodeSmart + ?? I haven’t had the time to do a complete feature comparison between other product lines, so I truly don’t know – but $4500 per concurrent license ($1500 named user)  reminds me of Rational (er… IBM)  licensing.  What I  would want is to have every developer outfitted with this software so that they can maintain their own code as they go forward.  With very expensive licensing models, organizations might elect a single person as the code analyst who runs the tool regularly to identify problems.  Again, I’m not sure which the better model is.  At the end of the day it is re-assuring that code is being scrutinized by more than just human eyes.  In retrospect, however, I have been on projects where we spent hours and hours (ie… many 10’s of thousands of dollars) hunting down bugs, memory leaks, etc.  If we expect this to happen on every large project (the larger the project, the more likelihood of this I guess) than there is no problem justifying these costs up front.  For the small dev shop however, this does hurt a lot!

Of course, this product also fits nicely into Compuware’s TrackRecord product that helps out with your project’s tracking, defect management, task management, and workflow automation tasks.  Compuware TrackRecord functionality is available when you have DevPartner Studio Enterprise Edition installed.  Again, HUGE points here as I believe that this type of software is what is really missing from ALL integrated development environments.  IDE’s should come with these features baked right in – not as separate products for extra money (Microsoft, are you listening?).  Until then, the MKS’s, Borland’s, and the Computeware’s need to cover this market – but make it affordable for heavens sake.  These add-on’s are as expensive, and in some cases, more expensive than Visual Studio.NET – and they are no where near as massive.