Users’ Choice: 2009 Software Development Platforms

Evans Data Corporation user satisfaction survey of over 1200 software developers

" ... their users abolutely love their tools ... " Evans Data Corporation 2009 User's Choice Survey

We extend a huge "thank you" to our valued customers for helping name the Rational tools suite #1 in Evans Data Corporation's 2009 survey of developers’ user satisfaction.

"IBM has spent a lot of time and effort to evolve their set of tools into a complete software delivery system, and they have succeeded."

Rational #1 rankings

Overall rankings. "This is no set of disparate tools thrown together in an attempt to bridge the problems of developers as they move from design to coding to deployment. Rather, the Rational tools suite, integrated together in the Jazz platform, takes software development into a new realm which blends together requirements, asset management, architecture, development, QA, deployment, and further to touch on operations and maintenance."
Application modeling tools. "The excellent application modeling tools … have again been ranked more highly by their users than any other IDE and toolset and by a wide margin … Rational Software Architect is a strong part of the Rational product line, and IBM has continued to evolve them into extremely powerful and easy to use modeling tools."
Web design/development tools. "The tools help Java™ developers rapidly design, develop, assemble, test, profile, and deploy high quality Java/J2EE™, Portal, Web/Web 2.0, Web services and SOA applications. IBM’s software group has devoted a lot of time and effort to making Web development easier, faster, and more accessible to everyone. The result is obviously a well pleased group of users."
Support for remote development. "Remote development has become increasingly important as teams become geographically separated … Rational Team Concert is the tool that enables developers working on the Rational Jazz platform to interact with each other and to coordinate their efforts. It’s a very visual tool in the suite and simplifies communications, collaboration, and distributed development."
Developer test tools including code coverage tools. "When we think of the development process as an end to end platform extending from requirements through development to deployment and beyond, test tools are definitely a big part of the process … [IBM is] integrating the Rational Quality Manager with their Rational DOORS requirements management product."

Other Rational top rankings — among commercial vendors

Quality of tech support
Support for parallel programming
Runtime memory analysis tools
Ability to integrate tools (second to Eclipse)
Availability of 3rd party tools (second to Eclipse)

"Rational scored better than any of the other development platforms in user satisfaction survey for the third year … the reason is a strategic targeted market focus into the needs of the development community and a devotion to excellence in execution that has produced a superior platform …"