Meet the DSP Team

We had a Q&A session with various parts of the DSP unit, including their VP, Martin Frid-Nielsen. It was a very upbeat conversation, and they really were trying to show that they were listening to their users. An important note is that they were going to focus next year on Caliber performance just like they spent the past year on StarTeam. In fact, they let slip that they are going to end the separation between StarTeam and Caliber requirements and try to house the Caliber requirements in the StarTeam repository rather than a separate db. I asked a couple of questions:

Q: What will the StarTeam integration into VS 2005 be like? Will it be better than the current integration?
A: Have you seen the JBuilder or DiamondBack integrations? The ones where your StarTeam client is basically another pane in the "developer dashboard"? That's what you'll see in 2005.

Q: In 5.2, there was a new connection type called "XML over TCP/IP".
A (from John Sileski): We wanted to see how slow we could make our client. :-)
A (from Randy Guck): We had users who needed to route all their StarTeam connections over port 80 for firewall compatibility, and this was a way to do it. Unfortunately, it's incredibly slow. It's so slow that we took it out rather than continuing support. We plan on doing something SOAP-based instead...when we get time.

I also need to look at Estimate Pro sometime, which is a product Borland just bought. I mean, Tom's great with Excel and all, but a better tool for project estimation couldn't hurt.