PRQA Announces Management Information System Version 1.1 for C and C++

“Since its launch in December 2009, and in the Beta trials before that, we have seen tremendous interest in MIS as a deployment platform for quality management,” said Fergus Bolger, CTO, PRQA. “The PRQA team developed MIS to tackle the escalating industry problem of poorly written and maintained software. Designed in response to feedback from major safety- and mission-critical customers who aspire to best practices in software, MIS delivers project quality management and reporting and raises visibility of issues and progress outside the development environment.”

What are the key features of MIS 1.1?
MIS 1.1 helps customers meet an essential objective - lifetime management of important software projects. This release increases customer ability to manage diagnostics by creating annotations against each one in the style of a conversation thread. Advances in report capability also mean that developers can produce a complete picture of coding standard compliance for any specific source version, incorporating suppressions, deviations, and these new diagnostic annotations.

Who benefits from these improvements?
Everyone in the development process gains through collaboration and greater visibility of code issues, remedial action items, and broader quality goals. Stakeholders outside of the immediate software labs gain particular benefit from this transparency, as members of this community have never before had access to such detail to supplement high-level project status reports.

Why is this increased collaboration and visibility important?
Project failure, including late delivery and imperfect software, has become a serious business-critical issue for many organizations. Previously, information about code and quality issues was limited in scope and only became available close to the expected completion of a project, which of course is too late. Now, the important business stakeholders and software development groups have a common understanding and appreciation for the true state of each software project at every step of the process.
…./…


How does MIS handle compliance reporting?
A project stored in MIS has the ability to produce a full compliance picture for any past version. MIS compliance reporting now includes all annotation comments in addition to suppressions and their accompanying permission to deviate, and can delve into each sub-module or file of the project to present its status in detail.

Where does this important technological improvement yield greatest benefit?
Every organization that creates products containing C or C++ will find value in this technology. MIS can track coding standard compliance, residual bug defects, language or other project metrics, or a combination of the above. Many embedded and system software providers from a wide range of application markets have deployed MIS, from auto to defense, medical to consumer.

What other functionality does MIS 1.1 offer?
MIS never takes a copy of a user’s source files, rather it connects to the Configuration Management System (CMS) to capture each required version of source and header file. With this 1.1 release, MIS provides native support for the top five major CMS products. PRQA also added considerably to the usability of the web-interface and created new components to better facilitate configuration and data upload. There is also considerable sophistication in MIS’s capability to compute rich user-defined metrics for quality trend presentation.