Borland Software Monday previewed updates to its Borland StarTeam and CaliberRM tools as part of a new vision for more closely tying the application development lifecycle to business processes.

At its annual Bor-Con developer conference in San Jose, Borland unveiled the Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) vision, a plan to make software development more cost-effective by mapping the software development process to business needs, said Martin Frid-Nielsen, Borland's general manager and vice president of Development Services Platform Business Unit.

"Software development is evolving from black magic to something that is becoming far more predictable and process-oriented and something that is aligned with business objectives," Frid-Nielsen said.

With SDO and related product changes, Borland appears to be heading in the same direction as its competing tools vendors, notably Microsoft and IBM Rational, which both have announced plans to more closely integrate different aspects of the application development lifecycle into an integrated development environment (IDE).