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Developer Populism is changing the face of ALM


By Dave West


 Dave West
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July 9, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Software is famously eating the world. It is incorporated into every aspect of our lives and is used by everyone. Regardless of industry, software provides an opportunity to organizations of all sizes.

For the majority of organizations, their ability to compete and differentiate is directly tied to the apps that run, sell and integrate their business. But software is not a commodity that is mined or drilled for, it is instead a commodity invented by software developers. Yes, software is a team sport, and any finished application or product is touched by many people on its way from idea to implementation. But the ultimate creators are software engineers.

In fact, the majority of modern development approaches, such as agile, put software engineers center-stage. Agile methods empower software engineers to work directly with customers, business stakeholders and marketing organizations. Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester analyst, describes developers as an “untapped resource for innovation and business opportunity.” But, for many managers, this idea strikes fear into their hearts.

Managers think of software development like any key process in their business, as one that should be managed and dictated. They believe that discipline, control and reporting must be applied to the practice of software development. Developer freedom and empowerment are easily confused with anarchy and chaos, and, for most organizations, software delivery projects are already late, confusing and, worst of all, under-deliver on their promise.

Historically, managers have looked to application life-cycle management to provide process control, reporting and traceability. ALM is described as the application of business discipline to the practice of software engineering, the solution to application chaos. ALM provides managers with the ability to control the application throughout its life cycle.  

For many organizations, the perception exists that ALM was driven by vendors. These vendors encouraged a single-tool strategy, standardizing on change management, reporting, version-control, testing tools and even IDEs. But as organizations introduced standardization initiatives, developers seemed in parallel to be adopting new tools. This was not always just to cause trouble, but instead was in direct response to business need.

Standardization is a great idea, but it is difficult for any one tool platform to innovate at the same frequency as the industry. Disruptions such as mobile, cloud and the open Web continue to change the fabric of development, thus making tool selection more difficult. Developers who historically would have used one programming language and one set of tools now look to multiple development languages, tools and techniques. The age of Developer Populism is upon us, where developers are like other craftsman bringing their own tools into the workplace.


Related Search Term(s): agile, ALM

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Comments


07/10/2012 10:13:03 AM EST

Nice article, on "Open standards" I might clarify that REST is really just an architectural style and by just doing REST does not just give you integration. OSLC http://open-services.net actually defines implementable specifications based on REST-style and Linked Data architecture and defining vocabularies for various ALM resource types.

United StatesSteve Speicher


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