A week after paying $480 million to buy one of the biggest names in the Agile development world for its project management services, CA Technologies Inc. is redirecting the acquisition train to its own partner ecosystem with the purchase of Grid-Tools Ltd. to complement that functionality. The combination could provide a multiplier effect for developer productivity in the enterprise.

The testing software that that the latter outfit has built to help reduce the time spent searching for bugs and other imperfections in code can help save a great deal of overhead at the kind of large organizations that CA targets, efficiencies that grow exponentially when Agile practices are mixed into the equation. The catalyst lies in the iterative nature of the methodology.

The focus on continuous improvement and collaboration at the heart of the approach can allow well-orchestrated  teams to produce upwards of dozens of changes a day compared to the few per quarter that the average enterprise has managed for the last few decades. But each of those updates still requires the same level of testing.

As a result, developers have to spend that much more time on verifying that their code is free of errors, which can produce significant delays  that undermine the whole purpose of Agile.. That’s where Grid-Tools comes into the picture.  Its software comes with analytic capabilities that can quickly analyze data from tests for bugs and make the results easily accessible to teams through a collaboration console.

That functionality will help CA’s customers take better advantage of its newly obtained project management software and make its pitch proportionally stronger compared to the competition. No terms were disclosed for the deal, but the synergy between its two latest acquisitions suggests that the capabilities will likely be integrated for easier consumption.

It’s also not unreasonable to speculate that CA’s will continue its spending spree seeing how critical of a role developers now have in the enterprise. With project management and testing off the checklist, future acquisitions may focus on containers, which have emerged as a key driver behind the industry-wide push to increase productivity and accelerate release cycles.

Photo by Riebart