Application Development & Lifecycle Management

June 23, 2009 - PRLog -- The options available for building software applications have never been so wide ranging as they are today. This is largely to do with the impact of the Web, with different solution models available depending on user needs, from infrastructure to end device considerations. The most recent trend of cloud computing is also opening new possibilities that are lowering the cost barrier, increasing access to high performance computing, and also lowering the skill barrier for non-programmer information workers, whether in SMEs or departments in large organisations, to build business applications.

KEY FINDINGS
- ALM systems have improved considerably from the first generation of products; the new generation is Web-based and strong on collaboration.
- Agile methodology adoption has entered mainstream development and is making developers and managers rethink how they carry out application development.
- Agile practices are having a major influence on the ALM solutions market; supporting Agile processes is a hot area.
- ALM system architecture identifies core lifecycle functions, including process support with workflow, integrated data repository, and reporting.
- Business Intelligence (BI) for application development has now become an ALM system fixture, offering advanced analytics applied to project statistics.
- Software estimation remains a niche activity but should, be a core lifecycle activity in ALM.
- Defect and Issue Management is another core activity that cross-cuts the application lifecycle and is supported well by leading ALM systems.
- ALM system users should have read-and-write features for process guides, allowing users to modify content, supporting collaboration and knowledge exchange.
- ALM systems that alter the functionality exposed depending on the process selected represent an advanced, state-of-the-art technology, not yet seen in the market.
- The rise in Software Systems Engineering reflects the increasing use of software

CATALYST
Application development continues to evolve with processes and methodologies receiving significant
attention through Agile practices, while on the tooling side a new generation of Application Lifecycle
Management (ALM) products are appearing with process and workflow support figuring largely.
June 2009

ANALYSIS
Introduction
Software application development is one of those subjects that never disappears but is always evolving. Since the last general survey Report on this subject – Application Lifecycle
Management (ALM), published in September 2005 – there has been a lot of activity in the ALM field. With our colleagues in Datamonitor we published an ALM Decision Matrix in 2007 that looked at the vendor ALM suite market, and we now repeat that exercise in this Report with all the leading vendors participating. (The Datamonitor Decision Matrix also replaces what used to be the Market Lifecycle Ratings in  Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports).
The areas that are currently receiving the greatest activity in application development are:
- Agile development and Agile project management.
- ALM.
- Testing and test management.
- Enterprise Web 2.0.

The application development subjects that are on the horizon, are:
- Development in the Cloud.
- Parallel programming (especially General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units – or
GPGPU).
- Extension of ALM to overlap IT governance.
- RESTful Service Oriented Architecture. (REST is Representational State Transfer).

While what and how applications are being developed evolves, developers are still needed to programme the machines and create these applications. It had been considered that advanced modelling such as Model Driven Development (MDD) in the guise of software factories would at some point deliver on the next leap forward, a technological breakthrough such as a higher abstraction compiler that takes models rather than a high-level programming language to churn out the machine code. The Object Management Group’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) appeared to be moving in that direction. This did not transpire, and is not likely to in the immediate future. These themes are expanded upon below.

Business Issues

Ultimately, software applications are built to satisfy the needs of the business, and the subject of the clash of two different cultures – the IT department and the rest of the business – has been discussed often, possibly to exhaustion. Some intractable problems become ‘solved’ through irrelevance because the ground has moved, and it can be said that whereas in the early days of computing the computer department in a business was a quite distinct function, a place where data was sent to be processed and returned with some useful statistics or reports, today there are businesses whose sole basis for existence relies on the IT function. Examples vary from obvious ones such as online banks and Web 2.0 companies, to less obvious virtual companies that operate solely due to the existence of the Internet and products with embedded software where the software component has grown exponentially. The net result of this shift towards greater reliance on IT is that the business has to take a greater interest in its IT function to succeed in the market, especially if the IT people are not delivering.

A real-world example illustrates how businesses are tackling this problem (names are omitted for confidentiality reasons): an IT company arose from being a small operation to having a billion dollar turnover in a short period. This company used to release its key platform application on an annual basis, but as a result of this rapid growth its current releases were taking 18 months and longer. The CEO gave the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) the highest priority directive to solve the problem. The CTO decided that all the company’s developers would switch to Scrum, the most popular Agile methodology, in big-bang fashion. The switchover was a success and delivery was back to a 12-month cycle. BT is another example where in this instance the CEO directed the company to adopt Agile, and an incremental adoption plan is in progress. Alternately, the concept of reducing waste is a message that many businesses understand and this is central to Lean Development, which takes many ideas from the lean movement and Total Quality Management, and combines them into an Agile methodology. Lean Development is found to be more comprehensible to businesses than some of the more developer-oriented Agile practices.

Businesses also want greater real-time insight into software project progress, and the new generation of BI solutions integrated into ALM suites provide this capability. Rather than reacting post-event, senior managers can act to avert problems escalating into software crisis dimensions. In particular, visibility
into quality control and test performance of the work in progress is necessary. When schedules become pressured, testing is the area that is traditionally cut by Project Managers. Therefore senior business managers must keep track of testing and quality – getting this wrong incurs long-term damage to the organisation in the marketplace. Agile methodologies are liked by business executives because they make
testing an integral part of the development lifecycle, not the last activity before
shipping.

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