Compuware Corporation and EZLegacy announced a partnership that provides customers with cross-platform automated analysis and metrics throughout the application lifecycle.

Under the agreement, Compuware will resell EZLegacy's EZSource: Analyze, Report and Dashboard, which fully automates all aspects of analysis and reporting across mainframe and distributed platforms, enabling technical teams to work consistently, more efficiently and with a higher degree of quality.

The growing complexity of enterprise applications poses new challenges to application developers, who are already expected to do more with less while managing heavy workloads. At the same time, the industry is facing a significant skills shortage, as highly experienced mainframe professionals who are experts in dealing with complex applications will consider retirement in the next few years. The EZSource toolkit complements Compuware's already comprehensive product offerings that together optimize developer productivity, reduce costs and improve software and service quality throughout the application life cycle.

Companies that use offshore providers for application development and maintenance will particularly benefit from the EZSource product suite. According to a recent independent study on the hidden costs of outsourcing, 80 percent of respondents claim difficulties with knowledge transfer is impacting the quality of outsourced projects. This often results in companies having to increase their investments in performance testing and troubleshooting due to the poor quality of work delivered by outsourcers. The EZSource toolkit addresses this knowledge gap by providing robust, automated analysis and measurements as well as detailed documentation and reporting, enabling outsourced teams to more easily verify code quality to make modifications to legacy applications and create new, high quality applications.

The suite includes:

- EZSource:Analyze -- automates source code analysis across platforms, enabling in-house developers as well as outsourced teams to take the guesswork out of determining which code needs to be modified -- and how those changes will impact other applications.

- EZSource:Report -- delivers automated, objective, metric-focused reporting and provides valuable insights such as "where used" and "dead code" occurrences, reducing overall application maintenance costs.

- EZSource:Dashboard -- provides IT managers a high level view of a company's application portfolio, including IT asset inventory, utilization, complexity, quality and resource consumption.

"There is a natural synergy between EZSource and Compuware's application management suite," said Eran Tirer, CEO, EZLegacy. "Application analysis and metrics are key to understanding the complexity, quality and cost of maintaining mainframe applications and, through that, reducing the level of technical debt."

"The EZLegacy portfolio aligns nicely with Compuware's mainframe solutions to help customers maintain and develop applications across the complete life cycle process," said Kris Manery, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Mainframe Solutions Business Unit, Compuware. "EZLegacy's ability to go beyond the mainframe and do impact analysis across mainframe and distributed, including SAP applications, is especially important given that in-house application knowledge is decreasing while application complexity is increasing. The addition of EZLegacy products will help Compuware deliver greater value to our customers across the globe."