Accenture to unveil two new software tools at SEE 2010

USA: At the upcoming Symbian Exchange and Exhibition (SEE) show in Amsterdam (Nov. 9-10), Accenture will be unveiling two new software tools that can help engineers who develop mobile handsets running on the Symbian operating system to potentially save mobile phone companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in software development costs.

These new tools mean that an engineer based in India, for instance, can debug, analyze and control by computer a mobile handset physically located somewhere else in the world.

This powerful remote access ability has significant cost benefits as it eliminates the travel expenses for an engineer who no longer has to go to where the handset is located.

By providing developers with pinpoint diagnostic and control capabilities, these tools also mean that a mobile phone can potentially reduce by several months the time taken for a phone to reach the market. For high-margin phones, the revenue implications of reaching an all-important market window ahead of competitors could easily be measured in millions of dollars.

Accenture has recently released the first of these tools, Fshell, as an extensible open source contribution to the Symbian platform. Fshell allows developers to write control scripts that automatically manipulate aspects of the data, applications, configuration, and system software running on a phone. In turn, this makes it easier to pin down and identify elusive error conditions that testers have noticed but which can be extremely time-consuming to replicate.

At SEE 2010 Accenture will also roll out the second tool, Autometric, which enables advanced automatic testing of mobile handsets:

* Autometric is an automated user interface (UI) level test and metrics gathering system for Symbian OS devices, which hooks directly into the operating system providing a more robust service than other tools on the market

* The Autometric test suite also accurately measures the time taken to execute large numbers of operations, without any human interaction, helping to avoid unexpected performance slowdowns when users try out different features of their phone

Accenture has already shared these two tools with a selected range of customers including equipment manufacturers, silicon vendors, middleware suppliers, and system integrators.