Optimising your operations

A Head-to-Head with Telelogic and Serena Software

ALM is the unsung hero of many successful businesses. CXO asked two industry thoughtleaders, Dominic Tavassoli of Telelogic and Eddy Pauwels of Serena Software, to explain why.

CXO. How can ALM improve time-to-market and reduce cost of development?
Dominic Tavassoli. ALM co-ordinates people, processes and tools in a continuously repeating cycle of interrelated activities: definition, design, development, testing, deployment and management. Automation and integration catch mistakes and inconsistencies before they become costly to correct, avoiding unexpected delays. Coherent metrics and real-time reports provide visibility to executive management, as well as a clear management process, throughout the application lifecycle to ensure that development processes stay on track.

Eddy Pauwels The key words here are ‘best practices’, alongside insight and automation. As markets are evolving rapidly, and demand into IT is in constant growth, but also ever changing, organisations need to look for better ways to identify where they are spending their time and resources on as well as how they are spending it. The adoption of targeted best practices allows IT to leverage the collective experience / learning to optimise the development processes and improve time-to-market. Automation of such optimal processes improves productivity and efficiency, as well as enforcing such best practices. ALM solutions further provide IT with the insight to make strategic decision and collaboration capabilities that are imperative for speed-to-market. As many of our customers have testified, both have a direct impact on cost and time to market.

CXO. Is ALM just another passing trend?
DT. ALM is the natural evolution of the software development lifecycle! ALM processes, such as requirements driven development, are those that have proven to help projects meet their goals. Modern technology now allows full realisation of these objectives, with web service APIs, global WAN accessible repositories and Web interfaces. Organisations should not hesitate to invest in ALM, as it is the most reliable route to better software and systems development today.

EP. ALM is not at all a recent trend. Managing the application lifecycle dates back to the early days of mainframe where cost of failure and hardware was significant. What did change though over the years is the scope of what takes part in ALM. Tools have evolved, disciplines have matured, new platforms have emerged, and the Internet came to life. In order to successfully manage the application lifecycle in a climate where business value needs to be proven, organisations need to look for tool support in order to automate best practice processes, gain insight and look for ways to improve collaboration between the different stakeholders in the application lifecycle. It is not a trend. It is becoming a necessity more than ever before.

CXO. How do I know if ALM a good fit for my own company?
DT. How important is software for your organisation? Are you seeing an increased demand for more complex embedded software in your products as demonstrated by consumer desire for the most feature-rich mobile phones, MP3 players, home theatre systems and futuristic advances, such as voice-activated entertainment/communications systems in cars?

Or, does your organisation take this demand several notches higher facing challenges characterised by high-stake risks to your customers and citizens? Sophisticated, high-tech systems in aerospace and defence projects must perform precisely and accurately. Medical devices with embedded systems must operate flawlessly to minimise risk of patient injury or death. Software and systems must be robust to minimise liability in the financial industry and to prevent identity theft. In all of these situations, flawless quality, rapid response to changing customer expectations and variants per region and platform are non-negotiable.

Improving quality of service and time-to-market to meet these demands requires ALM for seamless collaboration with partners, subcontractors, outsourcing organisations, global development teams and customers.

EP. First of all, I don’t believe there are many organisations left that don’t have any kind of support in ALM, this because ALM covers many aspects of the management of the lifecycle of an application, like requirements management, change and configuration management, build management, test management, deployment management, version management, to name some well known ones. The challenge organisations face is how to gain insight and steer the process for optimal performance. If organisations have problems answering key questions, like what is the impact of making these business requirement changes to the project? How do I know whether we are working on the right stuff for the business? Do I need to improve the efficiency and productivity of my distributed development team? Do I have full insight into what is happening and can I trace anything that happened back to the actual reason why?

Then looking at a good and well-integrated ALM solution is advisable. The latter is important: as many organisations will most likely already have pieces of the ALM puzzle, a good ALM solution, as Serena provides, will glue around what is already available and substitute or complement for the missing pieces. That said, for organisations not ready for full-scale ALM due to culture or other reasons, a phased approach might be a more practical one.

CXO. How can I lower the cost of deploying these initiatives across a company?
DT. Adopting an integrated ALM approach on a global, organisation-wide scale using a step-by-step process can lower the cost of deploying these initiatives across a company. The path to achieving these benefits can be broken into a succession of “maturity levels” with specific practices and products your organisation should implement and adopt. Connecting team members and stakeholders in an automated, integrated process to achieve traceability, visibility and co-ordination are integral to mature development disciplines.

ALM is not a magic bullet. There is no single ‘ALM product’ that can instantly meet all of the challenges. Rather, to be successful, ALM adoption is a process of attaining escalating levels of process maturity as advanced development products are integrated and seamlessly deployed across global teams.

EP. Well, this is a very good question, and I wish I could give a straight and simple answer to it. Problem is that an ALM initiative should be seen as a process improvement / change initiative and needs to be managed that way. These initiatives are very resource intensive and resource sensitive undertaking. The cost of deployment of an ALM solution has only for a fraction to do with the actual tools being acquired and rollout out. Most of the cost will go into the definition of the process(es) and the training and coaching of the resources (both into process as well as into tool(s). What Serena recommends is a phased approach, based upon an ALM maturity assessment of the organisation/department, so that change is introduced at a pace that maximises success. As such, cost depends largely on team maturity, internal process availability/maturity and size. Another important consideration is total cost of ownership (TCO). A standardised ALM solution across the entire company typically has a lower TCO than a variety of tools, processes and repositories does.

Dominic Tavassoli, VP of Product Marketing – Change and Configuration Management Applications for Telelogic. Mr. Tavassoli is VP of Product Marketing for Telelogic, the leading global provider of software and services for Enterprise Lifecycle Management (ELM). He has over 15 years of experience in process improvement solutions around CMMI and Agile and is currently working on Application Lifecycle Management solutions based on Synergy and Change, Telelogic’s leading Change and Configuration Management solutions.