Delivering Value

What should a successful application lifecycle management project achieve, and how can companies use ALM to deliver real value to customers and stakeholders? Business Management asked a panel of experts for their views.

BM. Application lifecycle management (ALM) looks at the process of delivering software as a continuously repeating cycle of inter-related steps. Amongst its benefits are increased productivity and quality; what are the other goals of a successful ALM project?
Doug Akers. Productivity and quality are high-level catch-alls in terms of benefits and the details under each are what really matter to many organisations today. Concepts like visibility, traceability, compliance, communication and collaboration all feed into these goals. Benefits like lower project costs, greater schedule control and higher customer satisfaction are the desired results.

Larry Boldt. When the success of ALM projects is simply measured by increased productivity and quality the real measure of success is overlooked: did we deliver true value to our customers? Companies that closely tie their ALM process to a business/IT alignment initiative can reap the benefits of a unifying direction for their company, better leveraging of IT, improved communications, more efficient allocation of resources and increased competitive advantage. Both vertical and horizontal alignments are required. Vertical, or top-down, alignment occurs when employees truly understand the organisational goals of the company and their individual role for achieving them. Horizontal alignment within the organisation is achieved when processes, like ALM, and infrastructure are aligned to meet the real needs of the customer. ALM projects tied to business/IT alignment are ones that deliver value to our customers.

Dominic Tavassoli. A successful ALM implementation will increase productivity as the team focuses on current business requirements, has less down time due to rework, avoids unnecessary activities through automation and makes better decisions faster. ALM helps organisations meet many other critical business goals: lowering the cost of development, designing and delivering innovative offerings, and embracing change at lower risk and cost. All these benefits help the organisation become more competitive and agile. Additionally, ALM helps enforce processes, trace development to requirements, generate traceability reports, and produce company-wide metrics. For many organisations, ALM is a solution to the levels of governance, compliance and accountability they need to demonstrate.

BM. The principles of ALM are integral to mature development disciplines. How far would you agree with this statement?
LB. Ryma believes that the three pillars of ALM, traceability of relationships between artefacts, automation of high-level processes, and providing visibility into the progress of development efforts are essential to a mature development process. Without traceability of artefacts, lifecycle activities are disconnected and chaotic. No-one knows which requirements are linked to tests, or which tests support which builds, etc. Without process automation, lifecycle activities take longer and consume more resources. Budget allocations are typically exceeded and time-to-market is impacted. Without reporting and analytics there is no way to measure progress or make informed decisions about project direction. For most organisations there is a direct correlation between the strength of the three ALM pillars to the strength of their development disciplines.

DT. Pursuing initial CMMI maturity levels is a logical first step for improving software process maturity. Organisations must first address foundational process areas before embarking on an ALM initiative. The strategy involves adopting mature products and best practices in areas including change and configuration management, requirements definition and management, testing and modelling; these have proven to be the successful foundation for a mature ALM solution.

Although improved processes in each of the above areas are important, the greatest benefits are realised when ALM brings them together, providing consistency, cross-team process, and more powerful analysis capabilities, for traceability, automated processes and consistent reporting across the lifecycle. The next maturity step is to extend this solid ALM foundation to all global teams, bringing together the organisation in a common, continuously improved process. The reach of ALM should also be extended to Business stakeholders (product managers, business process managers) to achieve full Enterprise Lifecycle Management.

DA. All projects have requirements and these requirements need to be implemented and tested – these are the core disciplines of ALM and a unified process aligning them all to a common goal are essential to success. Due to the interconnected nature of the various phases within the application lifecycle MKS advocates that ALM principles are integral to all development disciplines mature or not. The goal of ALM is to ensure that processes are followed, change is communicated and each constituent has visibility into the evolution of the project and its artefacts.

BM. How important are the integration steps of an ALM solution and how are these steps managed and accomplished through your solution?
DT. Integration is a fundamental aspect of ALM, providing the traceability and automation across disciplines and between stakeholders. The critical areas of integration are those that add the most value for the end-user; it is not necessary (or even desirable) to move all users to a single miracle product that covers everything. End user adoption is the key – providing the best functionality in each area with valuable integration, such as requirement driven development (complete traceability from needs to code) or round-trip traceability (auditing a build or release to see exactly what functionality is present).

Successful ALM deployments also integrate with existing tools inside the company for faster acceptance at lower risk. Telelogic’s ALM solution integrates with multiple SCM solutions, including Synergy, ClearCase and Subversion, to bring all teams together in a common process. Open Web services and standardised APIs bring business tools and stakeholders into Telelogic’s ALM process.

DA. An integrated solution based on process, rather than integrations between point products, will be much more valuable long term when it comes to implementing ALM within an organisation. Many, if not all, of the benefits and goals discussed above are enhanced when it is one system that is housing the artefacts and links between the artefacts across requirements, test and development disciplines. Change processes are unified, communication of accepted change is immediate, metrics which span the entire project are a by-product of daily activity, context for work can be navigated – this list goes on and it is all good value for the organisation. An integrated set of tools is better than a disjointed environment, that is certain, but neither can come close to the productivity of a truly unified solution.

LB. The strength of a vendor’s ALM solution is all about its connections and how well it integrates a set of lifecycle tools and activities. The Ryma solution provides a foundation for ALM by connecting it to the disciplines of innovation, product marketing, product planning and portfolio management. Ryma’s recent acquisition of IdeaScope, a business-to-customer product feedback platform, and FeaturePlan’s connectivity to Rally Software’s Agile Lifecycle Management tool set are just two examples of how Ryma is broadening the scope of its connections to ALM to support its customers. Using an IdeaScope survey, Ryma asked its customers to rate and prioritise the connectors that were most important to them. Customer participation and feedback was exceptional and provided a roadmap for developing the next set of connectors.

BM. ALM processes and tools have helped double software success rates – up to 35 percent from 16 percent a decade ago – but 65 percent still fail to meet some cost, quality or ROI objectives. In your opinion, how can better ALM practices and tools make for even more successful projects?
DA. These statistics prove that the current approaches to ALM aren’t working as effectively as they should. Traditional siloed tools that are integrated to various degrees are just not the path to greater success and higher ROI. You need an ALM strategy that centralises and unifies the process across disciplines. You need an ALM strategy that provides visibility and enables collaboration across boundaries whether they are project, geographic, role or organisational in nature. You need an ALM solution that unifies the capabilities across disciplines and allows you to actually get a handle on how your software is evolving at a business and strategic level with the ability to drill into the details. Being able to monitor projects and areas of application investment in real-time allows for better decision-making, and will ultimately lead to greater project success.

LB. Ryma believes that successful ALM projects result from closely linking them to a company’s business/IT alignment initiative. Our holistic approach to alignment provides a platform for both vertical and horizontal business alignment. It is based on a 3-legged overarching goal that allows companies to: anticipate market problems; cultivate business opportunities; and innovate product solutions. At its core is Michael Porter’s value chain, and to ensure vertical alignment each process in the value chain is linked to a business driver. To achieve horizontal alignment each development process addresses the alignment of business, people, process and technology. At the same time the process must be adaptive, modularised, actionable and measurable. This approach to vertical and horizontal Business/IT alignment is what Ryma refers to as the Adaptive Product Management (APM) process and takes ALM to a new level of delivering value to the business and the customer.

DT. Actually, the latest survey run by Telelogic also shows a current ALM adoption rate of 35 percent. The first answer would be “deploy ALM on the other projects too”, across the enterprise, on a global scale, instead of independently on each project. This brings together globally distributed teams and enforces common process across the organisation, which in turn enables the production and analysis of meaningful, consistent metrics, to continuously improve the process.

Success is also highly linked to user adoption and acceptance, balanced by the cost of education, mentoring, continuously informing of process updates. Interactive process guides provide a means for representing the organisation’s processes, with tool mentors to indicate how to carry out each activity, with a process guidance website for all stakeholders. This provides an easily maintained, efficient solution to ensure that all the users across the globe understand their role in the process and how to fully benefit from the ALM platform.

BM. With a US-led global recession looming, many companies are looking to innovation to get them through tough times. What role can ALM contribute to the innovation process?
LB. There are many definitions of innovation. Intuitively most believe there should at least be a correlation between innovation and new creative products. Out of the many formal definitions of innovation that exist, Ryma has found the intersection of these definitions to be simple enough. Innovation is, at a minimum, “The process of delivering increased value to the user through the implementation of new concepts”. During a downturn in the economy the voice of the customer becomes extremely loud. Customers are not necessarily looking for new products, but asking vendors to make their existing products more innovative and valuable. Connecting ALM to the innovation process can open a company’s development process to some of the smartest minds in the world-our customers. Customer and partner business networks become even more valuable during a recession.

DT. ALM addresses the two critical areas of innovation: capturing the initial spark of innovation and facilitating the development of inherently risky new offerings. ALM provides a means to submit new ideas and suggestions, which can be discussed by all global stakeholders and prioritised, to produce the agile set of requirements that balance projected value, resources and perceived risk.

The bidirectional traceability and continuous reporting that ALM enables gives complete visibility and impact analysis across the lifecycle, which is critical on innovative projects where you need to control a continuously evolving set of needs and implementation realities. Management also has access to real-time metrics and status reports to provide insight into actual project progress, to boost confidence in innovation. Finally, the ALM process should continuously evolve, taking into account post-mortem findings, to improve the success of each subsequent innovative project. These features make ALM one of the keys to successful innovation.

DA. ALM will contribute to the innovation process in one of two ways for a given organisation. Done right, it will enable the organisation to align development to the strategic goals of the business, speed time-to-market and improve the quality of their deliverables by optimising their process and enabling their resources to provide maximum benefit to the projects they undertake. A process and a tool which supports the enforcement of that process in a globally diverse, distributed development environment while enabling visibility, collaboration, and traceability and controlling and tracking change history to the various artefacts will be essential to reap these benefits. Done incorrectly, obviously, innovation will play second fiddle to more tactical activities that stem from poor quality misaligned releases that do not satisfy the needs of the customer.

THE PANEL:

Doug Akers leads the Product Management group at MKS Inc. and is directly responsible for the company’s Requirements Management offering among other application lifecycle management solutions.

As the Product Marketing Director-Ideation for Ryma, Larry Boldt is responsible for product strategy, product marketing and initiatives supporting customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Dominic Tavassoli has over 15 years experience in process improvement solutions around CMMI and Agile and is currently VP of Product Marketing for Telelogic.

What the analysts say
IDC forecasts continuing growth in the ALM services segment, with expected revenue approaching the US$61 billion mark by 2011. “Demand for ALM services will remain strong throughout our forecast period, and further market and product evolution will occur as service providers deliver more complete ALM practices and as consolidation continues,” says Melinda Ballou, Programme Director for ALM and Principal Analyst for the IT Management Service at IDC. ”Smaller service providers will continue to play a role in product and market innovation, particularly in SOA, Web 2.0, virtualisation, hosting and other emerging areas, and differentiated ALM services solutions and programmes will come into play in that context.”