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ALM opens doors to other brands and business pros


By Jeff Feinman
March 2, 2009 — 
Philip Deck hates the word “suite” in the context of application life-cycle management.

The CEO of MKS scoffed at the industry buzzword that describes a set of tools for designing, developing, testing and deploying software. To him, a suite simply means a bunch of rooms linked up by a hallway. It means a luxurious cozy hotel room or a college dorm that allows more than two students to share a living space. It does not mean a product that can properly manage an application life cycle.

“We don’t have a suite, we just have a single product,” Deck said. “The name ‘suite’ doesn’t support the level of integration that we have.”

Though Deck might have veered from calling his company’s product a suite, MKS Integrity is definitely a one-room show when it comes to ALM, managing all activities from requirements management to release management. While MKS has remained true to its approach, many companies have given up their single rooms over the past few years to invest in the ALM 2.0 approach, where everyone can be let in. This method puts a number of other doors leading into the room so that products from multiple companies can go in and out as they please.

Letting everyone in
One ALM company that exemplifies the notion of ALM 2.0 is Kovair Software. Sky Basu, CTO and president of Kovair, said the company also believes that ALM tools, no matter what company they are created by, should be integrated. Many major ALM companies have tools by virtue of acquisitions, but those products lack proper integration. Because of that, Kovair went to the drawing board and developed a browser-based product where all major products are integrated within a single framework, Basu said.

“We believe that there are great tools in many different areas that we don’t cover, like ClearCase, Perforce, Subversion, etc., so there are tools in areas which we don’t think we could add any more value,” Basu said. “So rather than trying to replace any of those tools, we integrate with them. By doing that, we don’t ask our customers to replace any of their existing tools even when we have a tool in the same category.”

For instance, Kovair offers requirements management software, but their application life-cycle product can work with many other requirements management tools. “We want to be a good citizen in the tool world and integrate with whatever existing tools the customer may have,” Basu said.

Basu added that it doesn’t make sense today to have client-server desktop ALM applications because more software is becoming browser-based, so there is no reason why ALM tools shouldn’t be. Many ALM tools have a browser interface, but those interfaces are typically very lightweight. For advanced features, developers have to use a client application. In contrast, Kovair’s ALM platform is architected for the Web, Basu said, and this helps distributed teams easily participate in the software life cycle.

One characteristic that many companies feel is integral to the application life cycle is process automation. With teams becoming larger and spread out on a global level, attempting to implement the process manually can be difficult. Executives from both Kovair and Urbancode said that process automation is necessary.

“No matter how many rules you make about traceability, if you’re trying to audit or trace manual processes, you’re essentially relying on those processes being executed correctly,” said Maciej Zawadzki, president of Urbancode. “That doesn’t happen all the time, whereas if you’re dealing with automated processes, then the traceability and compliance is essentially built into the process.”

Much like Kovair, Urbancode approaches ALM with an ALM 2.0 viewpoint, and it sells an ALM framework that developers can plug other tools into. Zawadzki said that along with a process automation engine, developers need built-in integrations. If a developer is using Subversion as his or her source code repository and HP Mercury Quality Center for testing, for instance, Urbancode offers integrations with popular products like those. Urbancode customers can also write their own integrations if the company doesn’t provide them.

Another key component to an integrated application life cycle is a data warehouse, according to Urbancode. Tools from multiple companies will produce large amounts of data, and Zawadzki said that customers are mostly interested in source code changes, who made them, and when were they made. Urbancode’s data warehouse can extract that data and associate it with data from other systems. For example, a developer can see what issues a source code change corresponds to and view the tests that go along with that change.

Perforce Software is another company that believes the best way to construct an ALM solution is to integrate best-of-breed components into a suite. Perforce executives identified the main parts of the life cycle as requirements management, software configuration management (SCM), workflow management, build automation, continuous integration and defect tracking. For these stages, a developer should find the best products in each area and integrate them together.

Perforce, a leader in the SCM space, said that SCM is the “foundation” of an ALM solution, while workflow management serves as the “heart.”

“Those two are most critical to integrate,” said Tom Tyler, senior product consultant with Perforce. “When I see ALM suites start to develop, it usually starts with those two systems. They go out earlier in the life cycle to tie in requirements, and then later in the life cycle to tie in build and release.”

Tyler emphasized that Perforce tries to offer a product architecture that gives “hooks” to integrate easily with other systems. Perforce also has branching and merging capabilities that let users combine changes if they’re working on different versions of a product simultaneously.

“If your SCM is weak, there’s a limit to how strong your suite will be,” Tyler said. “If it’s solid, you’ve got a good basis for building a strong ALM suite.”

Eggs in one basket
While many companies have adopted the ALM 2.0 approach that encourages uninhibited use of products from multiple brands, there are others that focus on a one-size-fits-all application life-cycle offering. MKS' Deck said that an ALM platform should have three main strategic capabilities: linking artifacts between different stages of ALM; change management; and configuration management of every artifact in the repository.

“The industry typically looks at ALM as a whole bunch of different disciplines,” Deck said. “The industry will say, 'Check all the boxes and have some kind of bus to connect those disciplines,' and that’s ALM. Most vendors have gotten there by acquiring something in those spaces, and they put a nice brochure together and say, ‘See, you can get this from a single vendor.’ We take a totally different approach to that."

Executives from Seapine said that while many people want an integrated, best-of-breed approach to ALM, it’s important to be realistic about how the integration will be done.

“I recommend taking a good hard look at what resources you have available and who’s actually going to do the work,” said Paula Rome, a senior product manager with Seapine. “You have to determine if it’s valid work that your developers are doing that would go directly to the bottom line of your company. Whatever the fad of the week happens to be, I think there are some fundamental truths about getting reliable software out the door. For someone getting serious about ALM, the first thing I would do is sit down with them and think about why you want to make this change.”

Organizations should make sure to involve as many people as possible during the ALM process, not just developers and testers, Rome said. ALM is a “soup-to-nuts” deal, from requirements to shipping, and there are a lot of people involved in that process. Even folks like tech writers and graphic artists often get overlooked when software is being created.

“Don’t just talk to and listen to your developers and testers, but look at other roles, your managers, stakeholders, graphic artists, everybody who’s involved in the process,” Rome said.

Another company that emphasized the importance of having everyone participate in the process is Ravenflow. Company executives said there is one overriding concept from Ravenflow: being able to bring together all team members, including project users and stakeholders from the business side.

“The key change we’ve seen since the economy crashed is a focus on bringing the whole team together,” said Adam Frankl, vice president of marketing for Ravenflow. “You can’t ignore the users. You have to make the users part of the team.”

Ravenflow’s concentration lies on business requirements and in helping business analysts write requirements that stakeholders can validate and development and QA teams can understand. Frankl said that the company has had a lot of interest from traditional ALM companies around integrating with their business requirements tool.

Get lean and simplify
Most companies agree that proper ALM should be a means of making software development more effective, collaborative and transparent. In today’s economic environment, a more efficient development process is important to avoid mistakes that could hurt a company financially. Ryan Martens, founder and CTO of Rally Software, said that because the economy is not quite the “rosy double-digit growth environment” that it was for a lot of companies in recent years, it has let them take some time to figure out how to make their software development processes leaner.

“Growth hides all issues for many customers,” Martens said. “But now, a lot of companies are thinking, ‘How do we make smart, short-term decisions in this economic crisis that have us come out of it in a better place than when we came into it?’ ”

Martens said the implementation of ALM isn’t just for project managers or developers, but something that coordinates that large group of people in a transparent and agile way. Rally helps companies become leaner with its software-as-a-service product that can connect distributed users all over the world. The company also has agile training and a coaching staff that helps teams plan their agile rollouts.

“The hand and glove to that whole picture is when you talk about how to do rollouts effectively. We’re talking about issues around how you measure and organize your processes and how you put in ALM tools to enable this,” Martens said. “I think that a big differentiator for us is being able to address this whole problem on our SaaS platform.”

While Rally tries to handle the entire problem with its offerings, Quest Software said the trick is to start small with the process. Starting with basic workflows and working gradually towards larger, more involved ones can lead to better results in the long run.

“Don’t over-engineer, don’t fall in love with a very detailed workflow,” said Ken Barrette, a product manager with Quest Software. “The tools can make it so easy to create a very complicated workflow, and people may almost get enthralled by that. But the reality is once they’ve been around the block a few times with different approaches to workflow, they may paint themselves into a corner and create an inefficient process.”

Quest provides change management and version control products for Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft’s enterprise resource planning products. Quest’s position as an ALM solution is oriented towards the needs of those application teams, company executives said. Those products aren’t made up of source code, so they are a little different than typical Java or .NET applications.

“Managing change isn’t as simple as checking the file in or doing a build, so that’s sort of where we come from,” Barrette said. “Our offering allows you to manage the changes you’re making to your Oracle or PeopleSoft application much like you would use CVS to manage change to your Java applications.

"There are some unique requirements that happen around a vendor-supplied application in terms of things like handling patches. We’ve got some capabilities that can do that type of impact analysis to make sure the vendors’ change isn’t going to override any changes you make.”

Of course, there are many choices for a developer or development team when it comes to ALM, and what may be right for one team might not work for another. Developers can saddle up with products they already have and manage the life cycle with something that lets them use those freely, or they can take care of everything in one process-encompassing product. The options are many, but there are options.


Related Search Term(s): ALM


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Comments

03/03/2009 02:22:41 AM EST

Jeff, it's an excellent overview in the state of ALM today. I would like to offer an innovator in ALM 2.0 for your next review, zAgile. We offer the only open source ALM 2.0 solution, as far as I am aware. zAgile vision: http://www.zagile.com/company/vision.html zAgile products: http://www.zagile.com/products/project-lifecycle-products.html video demos: http://www.zagile.com/products/overviewvideos.html open source download: http://www.zagile.com/2/testdrive.html and a blog comment versus other ALM players: http://alampitt.typepad.com/lampitt_or_leave_it/2008/10/whats-zagile-ve.html

United StatesAndrew Lampitt


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