IBM Rational will standardize its suite of automated software quality (ASQ) tools on the Hyades open source platform. By making its software-ality tools Hyades compliant, Rational will provide third-party testing tool vendors and IT organizations with a standardized platform on which to build products, reducing the need to re-create baseline capabilities such as HTTP load testing and runtime analysis.

The Hyades Project, formed in late 2002, is a subgroup of the Eclipse open source project that focuses on providing the necessary infrastructure to ensure the tool interoperability and data traceability required to unify all software quality efforts performed across the application development and deployment cycle.

IBM Rational's standardization on the Hyades platform coincides with the unveiling of its Continuously Ensure Quality initiative (CEQ). As the problem of poorly constructed software costs organizations more than $22 billion per year, software development teams must enact improved processes to combat the problem. The CEQ initiative provides the framework for those improvements.

With CEQ, Rational will focus on every phase, role, process, artifact and building tools and capabilities explicitly targeting the proactive assurance of quality. This includes everything from business process modeling to IT management and monitoring.