Krugle upgrade targets code maintenance issues

By Robert Mullins

July 9, 2008 —

Software code search specialist Krugle thinks code maintenance tasks can be simplified with better search functions against software in development and already deployed, something an industry expert says is sorely needed.

Krugle released yesterday its Enterprise 2.3 search appliance that plugs into an application life-cycle management system and finds the sections of code that need fixing in a maintenance upgrade, even when the code is slightly reconfigured for different end users, it said.

Depending on the size of the business and its code maintenance workload, more efficient code search could save from US$4 million to $20 million annually, said Mel Badgett, Krugle’s vice president of product marketing, citing an industry-standard calculation method.

Badgett suggested that, for example, software is written to run on cell phones but must be reconfigured for different wireless carriers and handset makers. Deploying a software upgrade or bug fix could be complicated and costly depending on the number of supported platforms.

“What happens right now,” he continued, “is that a lot of the [post-release] development and maintenance … happens independently.”

But a software maker could use Krugle’s code “snippet” feature to search for exact matches in the code, he noted, as well as similar matches that could be reconfigured code in different branches or releases of the software. The Krugle appliance searches for the section of code that is a problem in all occurrences of that software.

“You’re coordinating all these efforts,” Badgett added, so that development teams don’t wind up managing their mistakes in isolation from the rest of the IT effort.

Companies with billions of lines of source code need this kind of search capability, said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of research firm Voke, as practices such as component development and parallel development take hold.

Component development refers to sections of code combined to perform a specific function and plugged into a software project. Parallel development refers to sections of code place on different “branches” in a code project that have slightly different configuration, as in the cell phone example above.

“The fact that Krugle is saying, ‘We’re going to help you with your maintenance,’ which we all know is a big part of every IT system’s budget, probably up in the 80% range … is a powerful solution,” Lanowitz said.

Version 2.3 of the appliance also features a four disk-drive configuration that stores, replicates and analyzes up to 10 billion lines of code at a time. Pricing for Enterprise 2.3 starts at $15,000 annually for an appliance with the capacity to search 5GB (or 50 million to 75 million lines) of code at one time, said Matt Graney, Krugle’s vice president of product management. The price rises for larger-capacity appliances.

Krugle’s estimate of the potential savings from more efficient code search is based on calculations by Capers Jones, a software consultant and author of the book “Estimating Software Costs.” The estimates calculate the average percentage of code under management in an enterprise in which there are expected to be “issues,” said Badgett, such as needed upgrades, reconfigurations or bug fixes; the Jones analysis also factors in the maintenance labor expenses of the business. The larger the company and the more code it needs to maintain, the larger the potential savings, Badgett concluded.

Version 2.3 can also index code files and allow the user to enhance code file search queries with custom qualifiers, such as file identifiers and other metadata, said the company. It’s the equivalent of adding tags to a blog posting, noted Mike Gualtieri, a senior analyst with Forrester Research.

“I think that’s very smart,” said Gualtieri. “I imagine [Krugle] could make it very easy and as long as they can do that, it’s a great feature.” The hard part, he conceded, is that software development associations such as the Eclipse Foundation or the Linux Foundation would need to agree on a common vocabulary of tag terminology.

Related Search Term(s): ALM, search, software development, Krugle

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