The benefits of ALM

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 the goals of a successful ALM product? CXO asked Serena’s Eddy Pauwels, Ryma’s Larry Boldt and Telelogic’s Dominic Tavassoli.

CXO. Is improving productivity and quality the goal of a successful ALM product?
DT. This is far from the complete picture. A successful ALM solution will indeed increase productivity as the team focuses on current business requirements, has less down time due to rework, avoids unnecessary activities with automation and managers make the right decisions faster. ALM improves quality by reducing the number of defects due to miscommunication, catching inconsistencies between requirements, enabling efficient testing, and generally ensuring that the final application meets the needs and expectations of users.

ALM also helps organisations lower the cost of development, design and deliver innovative offerings, embrace change at lower risk and cost. All these benefits help the organisation to 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.

EP. Both are certainly goals that many customers aim for, but there are more. At Serena we consider the following four key improvement areas as important for ALM: visibility, efficiency, productivity and agility. 

First, efficiency can only be achieved when the right people are on the right projects at the right time, doing the right things on the right items. This is impossible without visibility into projects, people, costs and items. Lack of visibility also inhibits the improvement process altogether. Efficiency and productivity are the results of less time spent searching for and passing around work between different people and development systems through automation, integration and collaboration in combination with an aligned implementation process. This means process choice and agility are also key. Quality is a result of effectiveness, efficiency and visibility

LB. It’s not quite that simple. Just as other application developers insure strategic alignment between product development and investor constraints, so do ALM solution providers. Successful software applications must increase business value, and ALM products are no exception. This is accomplished by delivering ALM products that support one or more of the five business drivers: increase revenue, decrease cost, increase sustainability, decrease risk and/or increase efficiency.

ALM 1.0 products were limited to delivering improvements in productivity and quality, but successful ALM products now must deliver more for less. Today’s ALM products need to help anticipate market problems, cultivate business opportunities, and innovate application solutions. Our customers aren’t happy with managing the status quo; they require an ALM product that enables Application Lifecycle Leadership. With our ALM product they expect to deliver software applications with sustainable leadership to the market place.

CXO. How will ALM affect product installation?
DT. To achieve the business benefits I mentioned, ALM products must evolve from vendor-specific, single-site solutions to part of a Global ALM ecosystem. The first aspect of ALM is the integration between teams, and therefore their tools of choice. For immediate return on investment, you must be able to connect your existing users to the ALM workflow. Open, standards-based integration capabilities will be critical, for instance based on Web services.

The core elements of ALM, in particular requirements management, change management and configuration management, will benefit the most from very close integration, so choosing them from a single vendor is logical, for distributed, 24x7 coordination and re-use. This will enable the key best practice of Requirements Driven Development (RDD). ALM installations will also share common services available across practitioner tools, providing collaboration, workflow, user access control, security, and reporting and analytics. This will ultimately lower the cost of ownership and administration.

LB. ALM products need to go beyond technology and also address people, process and business needs during product installation. All the activities of the innovation value chain impacting people, technology, process and business produce a monolithic quagmire. Successful ALM installations must support both an adaptive process and an incremental deployment. But be careful, this isn’t the normal approach of piloting all the functionality of ALM with a small group, and then expecting to deploy it across your organisation if successful.

By incremental, I suggest deploying a little ALM to as many people as possible and then slowly adding functionality until you have a full ALM installation. In an adaptive process I propose installations based on a fixed-rate opposed to a fixed-price, fixed-intervals of implementation as opposed to a single due-date, and flexibility in the amount of ALM capability within each interval that is buyer-gated and user-designed.

EP. It varies within each organisation. While ALM spans the lifecycle of an application from inception up to deployment, it all depends on how far an organisation is willing to go in implementing it as one entity. In many organisations, there is a clear split between IT development and IT operations. As a result, product releases are handed over between the two departments and the term ‘deployment’ becomes ‘making the release available for putting in production’. Both departments often operate different toolsets, which we could easily integrate with through an appropriate ALM mashup.

CXO. Is it true that ALM cuts maintenance time by synchronising application and design?
DT. ALM reduces cost of maintenance, although synchronising application and design is just one way. The first step to improve maintainability, as defined by the ISO 9126-1 Quality standard, is to enforce programming rules and code metrics as part of the ALM process, so that code is more stable, analysable, changeable and testable. Aligning systems and software development lifecycles with requirements improves traceability and understanding to dramatically improve 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 organizations to embrace change and turn it into an opportunity, instead of a cost.

Finally, by coupling the best practices of ALM, RDD and Model Driven Development (MDD), teams can design the system at a much higher level, fixing defects and adding enhancements at a vastly reduced cost.

EP. Nothing cuts maintenance time like getting it right the first time, but in case maintenance is required due to changes in business or market needs, it is key to understand change dependencies and impact to optimise efficiency.

Investment in understanding user needs early in the development process yields long-term savings in potential rework. Unfortunately requirements elicitation has long been more of an art than a science. Business users, developers, testers, etc. conceptualise requirements in dramatically different ways. The best requirements gatherers have become adept at translating these different views – spending countless cycles trying to get everyone on the same page.

Instead of trying to translate lists of requirements into design specs, high-fidelity prototyping applications like Serena’s free Prototype Composer make it possible for teams to collaboratively build working simulations of applications without writing a line of code.

LB. The answer is no. Synchronisation of application and design is a contributing factor, but this is not sufficient enough to cut maintenance time. That’s the point of ALM, a holistic view is required. It’s necessary to synchronise design requirements with developed product, but it’s just ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ if the user-needs haven’t been synchronised with the release plan. Even a synchronised release plan won’t reduce maintenance time if it hasn’t been synchronised with the product plan and resource availability. ALM uses many capabilities to reduce maintenance time. Strong analytics that help anticipate problems before they arrive, a strong collaborative environment to help cultivate new opportunities to respond to those problems, and a strong innovation capability to design value into new products for both the investors and the market are also necessary.

CXO. How is integration accomplished in your solution?
DT. The first step of ALM is to integrate the key practice areas of requirements management, change management and configuration management. Telelogic’s integrated DOORS, Change and Synergy solution offers the rich, proven functionality that has been successfully deployed to hundreds of customers, enabling requirements driven development and a global change control board.

ALM should also extend to all developers, regardless of location and tool. Telelogic offers a global ALM backbone that connects not only to our own SCM product, but any tool the developers might use, including ClearCase and Subversion.

Telelogic’s ALM solution brings together all stakeholders via open integration API and standards, including testers, production teams, PLM, product managers and business process managers. We help our customers build better systems and software, while meeting compliance objectives.

LB. There are three major differentiating ALM integration strategies: single-vendor, multi-vendor applications-private integration and multi-vendor. But some integration strategies may only address data-exchange; others may address data-exchange and data flow synchronisation; still others support process automation across multi-vendor applications.

Ryma believes in the multi-vendor ALM solution. We are one of the founding supporters of the IPM Alliance, which is an organisation composed of representatives of other professional organisations, universities, solution providers and company sponsors promoting Integrated Product Management. There is an IPM methodology that enables integration and deployment of ALM functionality which addresses ALM holistically, yet allows deployment in bite sized chunks. Each chunk effectively addresses people, technology, process and business needs.

EP. There are different ways to look at integration: between Serena components and between the wider ALM solution set already available within the organisation. At Serena, we do not believe in a ‘replace all’ approach. This is why a few years ago we initiated the Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) project within the Eclipse foundation. ALF provides a standards-based method for integrating disparate application lifecycle systems from multiple vendors. 

Last year, we released Serena Business Mashups – a platform that expands on the ALF concepts. Using Serena Business Mashups you can build integrations through an easy visual drag-and-drop designer. Serena and our partners have created pre-built mashups that orchestrate common development processes and combine different systems. The advantage is that integrations become graphical templates which can be viewed and adjusted as opposed to remaining a ‘black-box’.

To optimise productivity, functionality for the contributors should be embedded as rich interfaces within their IDE’s where possible. Finally, when it comes to Serena tool integration, we provide ALM mashups as well as single repository level integration.

Eddy Pauwels, Serena
With over 17 years of experience, Eddy Pauwels has a broad background in IT, ranging from Application Lifecycle Management and Project and Portfolio Management to Information Management. At Serena, Pauwels is Domain Experts Director for EMEA. He works closely with customers and R&D and helps with the positioning of Serena’s solutions.

Larry Boldt, Ryma
Larry Boldt is an accomplished software engineering and marketing manager with over 30 years of experience in managing and delivering business process improvement products and services. As the Product Marketing Director Ideation for Ryma, he is responsible for product strategy, product marketing and initiatives supporting customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Dominic Tavassoli, Telelogic
Dominic Tavassoli is VP of Product Marketing for Telelogic, the leading global provider of software and services for ELM. He has over 15 years 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 Change and Configuration Management solutions.