Putting the L in ALM – Making the case for Lifecycle Integration
I think everyone agrees that software delivery is not an ancillary business process but is actually a key business process, and the ability to deliver software faster, cheaper, and of a higher quality is a competitive advantage. But delivering software is difficult, and if you believe the Standish Chaos report, anywhere from 24 to 68 percent of software projects end in some form of failure.
Even the criteria for success has been questioned by many, as ‘on time, on budget, delivering the functionality requested’ can still mean software that fulfills requirements but adds no business value. Billions of dollars a year are spent on software development tools and practices in the desire to increase project success and reduce time-to-market. Each year, development, testing, requirements, project management and deployment roll out new practices and tools. Many of these additions bring value, thereby increasing the capability of each individual discipline. But ultimately, the problem is not the individual discipline; the problem is how those disciplines work together in pursuit of common goals and how the lifecycle is integrated across those disciplines.
It has been a year since I joined Tasktop, and during numerous customer visits and partner discussions, two things are very clear: 1. the landscape of software delivery tools and practices is going through a major change, and 2. to be effective in software delivery you need to automate flow and analytics.
The ever-changing face of software tools and practices
Add Agile, Lean Startup and DevOps to a large amount of mobile, cloud and open web, and not only do you have the perfect book title, you have all the ingredients necessary for a major change in the practice of software delivery. Agile and Lean encourage rapid delivery, customer feedback and cross-functional teams focused on delivering customer value. Mobile and cloud are changing the landscape of delivery platforms, architectural models and even partner relationships. Never before have we needed to build flexible development processes that encourage both feedback and automation. Imagine spending three months writing a specification for your next mobile application when your competitors deploy new features on a daily basis. Imagine not connecting your new sales productivity application to LinkedIn, where your sales people have all their contacts. Our development approach needs to not only include partner organizations and services but also deliver software at a much higher cadence.
Automation of Flow and Analytics (reporting) is key.
I have noticed a strange relationship between increased speed, reporting and integration. When you increase the speed of delivery, traditional manual processes for reporting and analytics stop working or become an overhead. For example, one customer spent two days compiling the monthly status report spreadsheet across development, test and requirements. This two day effort required meetings with numerous people and emailing the spreadsheet around for comment and review. When the organization adopted two week delivery sprints, this work was an overhead that no one wanted to endure. Now the company had a choice: drop the status report, or look to an automated solution. Because more frequent releases meant the need to collaborate better, they opted for an automated solution that connected the test, development and requirements tools, providing a report that described the flow of artifacts among these three groups.
The automation not only resulted in creating the report but also improving the flow between these different disciplines. Suddenly there was clarity as to the state of a story or when a defect should move into test. This clarity was avoided in the manual approach, which left large amounts of ambiguity. The report drove the creation of automated flow, which resulted in a better process, which then fed the report with better data.
That means there is a sixth discipline in software delivery
Lifecycle Integration is emerging as a key discipline for ALM. It provides the glue that enables the disconnected disciplines of requirements, development, testing, deployment and project management to connect. It unifies the process and data models of the five software delivery disciplines to enable a unified approach to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).
Without integration, many of the disconnects go unrecognized, and the flow between groups is never optimized. The larger your software delivery value chain, the more pronounced the impact of these disconnects. Factor in external organizations, either through outsourcing, application integration, service usage or open source, and these impacts can mean the difference between not just project, but business success and failure.
Perhaps we in the software industry are suffering a bit from the ‘cobblers children syndrome,’ with integration being a first-class citizen in the traditional processes we have integrated for our business clients for years. But the time is right to apply these lessons and build a discipline around lifecycle integration for the practice of software delivery.
