Taking ALM to the next level: A Head-to-Head with IBM

Application lifecycle management (ALM) looks at the process of delivering software as a continuously repeating cycle of inter-related steps. Amongst its benefits, proponents claim, is increased productivity and quality, accelerated development and cuts in maintenance time. Are these goals of a successful ALM producer? CXO asks Borland’s Andy Seager and IBM’s Syed Raza.

CXO. How does ALM become a competitive differentiator organisations?
Andy Seager. Done properly, ALM allows organisations to realise the true benefit of software within their business. ALM is about people and processes, underpinned by tooling that manages effective, on time delivery of software projects. This ultimately allows organisations to capitalise on market opportunity and drive customer loyalty – a competitive edge that most companies seek. Today, roughly 40% of software spend is consumed on re-work resulting from badly specified requirements and defects. Whether it’s your software quality process, traceability between ALM artefacts or a lack of visibility into your various process areas, combined together these contribute to the negative headlines that surround IT failure. ALM directly addresses these concerns and helps organisations to transform software delivery into a managed and predictable business process. By supporting ‘Open ALM’, Borland seeks to embrace a pragmatic approach to ALM where organisations have the choice in platform and processes they wish to improve.

Syed Raza. ALM lets you orchestrate your software development activities in tune with your overall business objectives and enables you to bring people together on a cohesive platform for optimised productivity. It lets users communicate, co-ordinate development efforts and avoid duplication through intelligent associations in their software development and delivery environment. Connecting team members and stakeholders in an automated, integrated process to achieve traceability, visibility and coordination is integral to mature development disciplines and in responding to ever-changing business stakeholder needs. As organisations seek resources and markets globally and the footprint and complexity of software increases, successful ALM strategies become a critical differentiator for organisations bracing to meet these challenges.

CXO. How can I quantify the benefits achieved by implementing ALM in my development environment?
AS. Your ALM vendor should be able to help you identify your current ability in the process domains of ALM: Requirements definition and management, change management and quality management. Together, you should be able to map a journey of improvement that will likely be a mix of process transformation steps, and the supporting tools. The steps within your transformation can be mapped to real issues that impact your software projects – like re-work, poor requirements and an inability to cope with change – so it’s relatively easy to identify the ROI in doing these things better. Borland recently announced the release of Borland Management Solutions (BMS), a major focus of which is monitoring key ALM performance metrics and presenting information in a consumable, actionable format for all of the stakeholders in the process.

SR. The benefits from true ALM are both qualitative and quantitative. ALM aims to co-ordinate people, processes and tools in a continuously predictable 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. Aligning systems and software development lifecycles with requirements improves traceability and understanding to dramatically improve the cost of maintenance. A major maintenance cost cause is change. By providing a fully integrated, controlled change lifecycle across all stakeholders and geographies, Global ALM allows organisations to embrace change and turn it into an opportunity, instead of a cost. Today’s ALM solutions provide real-time metrics and views into a project’s health for optimal decision-making. There is support for CMMI level metrics, as well as statistical reports and dashboards on portfolio progress.

CXO. What are the flaws in today's ALM tools and approaches and what is your company doing to address them?
AS. There are a couple of key concerns with the current state of ALM, one is the integration of the underlying ‘point’ tools for the various phases so that they support the process and workflow across the software delivery life cycle (SDLC) – this directly impacts productivity. The other is an inability to effectively measure progress and surface meaningful metrics in a time frame that supports corrective action. Borland is committed to both these aspects of ALM improvement. We continue to build connectivity capability between the tools that exist today, plus we’re solving the workflow and measurement issue with Borland Management Solutions. Right now, we can help customers solve the silo issues from a process and tooling perspective and we can automate the collection of key metrics that support informed decision-making. Visibility is absolutely the key to improvement.

SR. Today’s ALM environments have too many silos and manual points of control between disciplines. Organizations tend to get locked into expensive technical architectures that are monolithic and slow to evolve. Tools drive lifecycles and workflows of processes, and integrations are poor and expensive to maintain. Meaningful reporting, visibility and metrics are hard to ascertain. Global development especially is faced with communication and collaboration bottlenecks.

IBM is focusing on providing solutions to help customers achieve greater value and performance from their investments in delivering software by providing a transformational, integrated platform. We envision a framework for greater openness, collaboration, right-size governance and day one productivity for customers’ teams. Our vision is to provide an extensible process and a repository-neutral, open standards-based collaborative platform for software and systems delivery.

CXO. How does ALM help align technology decisions to business needs?
AS. Historically, ALM has not delivered on this promise; not enough was being done to make effective investment decisions across a multitude of requests from the business. Demand and portfolio management has typically been a rather disconnected process that was not sustained as the reference point for an active project portfolio. Consequently, the business found it difficult to evaluate the value of a portfolio against actual progress and outcomes of the projects within it. Borland Management Solutions provide a vehicle to manage demand and make decisions across portfolios because it links these activities to every stage of the SDLC – so now the processes are connected. Demand items can be linked to requirements and other ALM assets. Project progress can be monitored against up-front assumptions – the business can now align priority with need and can continuously monitor the heath of a portfolio and assess its true value to the business.

SR. ALM is not a magic bullet. It is a disciplined, incremental, evolutionary approach to business agility. Aligning technology decisions ever closer to business needs is the critical frontier in ALM adoption. It helps achieve this through a dynamic integration of people, processes and projects. ALM provides for a greater ease of consumption, extensibility and integration to meet the unique usage needs of customers.

Improving quality of service and time-to-market to meet these demands requires ALM for seamless collaboration with partners, subcontractors, outsourcing organizations, global development teams and customers. 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. This is an organisational learning process, and ALM serves as a catalyst in its achievement.

CXO. How does ALM help achieve collaboration among globally distributed teams?
AS. One of the key advantages of ALM is the ability to support global teams; this is where tooling provides an essential advantage. ALM seeks to provide information repositories that align teams and processes irrespective of location. One of the keys to successful distributed development is the creation of a ‘single source of truth’ to act as benchmark for all activity and asset changes. Implemented properly, such repositories allow distributed teams to share and communicate with ease, which in turn drives true collaboration. ALM seeks to provide transparency for teams by allowing them to work on common sets of assets, using common processes, thus surfacing the impact of changes with minimal or no time delay to all stakeholders. Processes that are heavily dependent on manual intervention or subject to delays in propagating changes are error prone and add risk to project success – automation really is the key to predictability and efficiency.

SR. Globally Distributed Development (GDD) is real and transformational. Although the benefits of this practice are many – savings in money, time and skills arbitrage –organizations serving global markets and utilizing distributed resources face increased pressures and challenges on the path to ALM adoption. ALM includes provisions for enhancing collaboration and communication between diverse, geographically separated development groups both inside and outside your organization. A global ALM solution provides Web- and WAN-enabled capabilities that control the meaningful flow of work assignments, changes, and other critical lifecycle information and attributes regarding project progress.

A common repository for software assets that unifies team members on a centralized, integrated SCM platform is a major advantage. This platform can be extended to incrementally integrate with lifecycle tools for requirements engineering, testing, deployment, business architecture, portfolio management and integrated change management. The solution enforces governance principles, validates compliance, provides real-time visibility, optimizes workload balance, facilitates organizational learning and reduces administration and logistical overheads, thereby leading to all-round agility.

Andy Seager is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Borland. He is
responsible for leading the product strategy for Borland’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions that address the company’s vision for OpenALM. With over 10 years of experience in product marketing for the technology sector, he has a proven track record in execution and management.

Syed Raza is currently developing Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions working closely with IBM customers in defining the overall solution offerings and go-to-market strategy. His background is in the systems and software engineering industry where he has worked in various roles including product management, software architecture and development and business consulting.