Mea culpa, ALM toolmakers say
Stories Columns Opinions Resources
Sun extends Groovy, PHP support to NetBeans
Version 6.5 of the IDE will see complete support for those two languages along with comple...
|
Sun reorganizes its software production infrastructure
Facing economic hardships, lost revenue and loss of employees, Sun has split its software ...
|
Adobe steers Flash toward RIA implementation
At this year's Adobe MAX Conference, the focus was on Flash, this time making Flash more o...
|
BigLever builds a bridge to SCM with Gears
The Gears Universal Configuration Management Bridge allows CM systems to integrate with Ge...
|
SOA Watch: New economic realities
In the current economic downturn, agile programming and SOA are attractive options that bu...
|
Integration Watch: A new twist on threads
The key to raising the efficiency of multiprocessors is to shrink the overall workload by ...
|
Integration Watch: The Return of NetRexx?
Java scripting languages are seeing a surge in popularity, with NetRexx looking particular...
|
Windows & .NET Watch: Transaction crowd gets a boost
With multicore chips becoming the standard for processors, the need for a flexible, usable...
|
From the Editors: Election should shake up JCP
Rod Johnson has the right ideas for opening up the Java Community Process, and he may be a...
|
Letters to the Editor: Sun gives REST, SOAP choice
A reader takes issue with a headline on our story about Sun working with REST along with S...
|
Guest View: Be smart and lazy
The optimal solution for problems is the simplest one, so always aim to streamline your ap...
|
Zeichick's Take: From EXEC to EXEC 2 to REXX to NetRexx
Andrew Binstock's column last week, "The Return of NetRexx," brought back some fond memori...
|
Practical tips for saving money on code maintenance
If software design is expensive, well, code maintenance is even more so. When you look...
|
Transform your app-dev quality by involving the whole community in testing
As the saying goes, the more eyes you have on software, the shallower the bugs. That’...
|
Build your dev and test labs for less – a lot less – with virtualization
You don’t have the budget to equip developers and software test teams with all the har...
|
Software Common Hacks and Counterattacks: A Guide to Protecting Software Products against the Top 7 Piracy Threats
Software piracy continues to be a growing epidemic. This white paper examines prevalen...
|
By Jennifer deJong
April 15, 2008 —
They admit it: early ALM suites never really delivered.
Now, aiming to make good on earlier unmet promises, ALM toolmakers are offering a new vision of application life-cycle management. In an about face, toolmakers are de-emphasizing the importance of a single set of tools from one provider. They say the new ALM focuses instead on the process and information that connects those tools—and on moving businesses a step closer to the elusive goal of delivering better applications, faster.
Essentially sets of tools encompassing requirement management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, release management and more, early ALM offerings were promoted as the unified approach to the entire life cycle. At any time, analysts, coders, testers and other participants in the application development process could see what others were doing, and where a project stood—or so the vision went. Which requirements have been coded, tested and released? Which are still works in progress?
That was the vision, but in reality, answers to those questions were hard to come by, and the notion that the right hand always knew what the left hand was doing was greatly oversold. “We haven’t delivered on the unified vision, and we are all equally guilty of selling it,” said Rick Jackson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for ALM toolmaker Borland.
Early ALM suites were made up of siloed tools, which offered only limited ability to share data, said IBM Rational director of offerings management Ashok Reddy. “The integrations were fragile.” Connections among the tools in ALM suites were little more than point-to-point links, he said. “The tools need to fit the way people want to work, not the other way around,” added Cliff Utstein, vice president of marketing for software configuration management toolmaker AccuRev.
A key reason why integrations among tools were limited is that many ALM toolmakers built their suites by buying companies to fill in the tool gaps, said Reddy, referring to IBM’s 2003 purchase of Rational Software, among other acquisitions. [see box] A complete set of tools in hand, they set out to enable the disparate offerings to work together. But because each tool defined the concept of a project differently, it was difficult to do much more than just share data, said Reddy. “Some tools see a project is a set of assets. Some define it as a set of code.”
Forrester analyst Carey Schwaber agreed that true connections weren’t really there. “Just because [an ALM suite] has a requirements tool and a testing tool, doesn’t mean that you have a connection,” she said. And enterprise customers have not built those connections themselves. “They say: ‘We understand the [ALM] vision but we are not there yet.’”
The real world is very different from the aspirational view of things, said Dan Koloski, CTO and director of strategy for testing toolmaker Empirix. “As a vendor, part of the job is to outline [those aspirations] to give guidance. But you also have to live in the reality of the user experience.” Everyone understands, for example, that testing should happen earlier in the software development cycle than it does. “But we live in the world of tight deadlines, and inconsistent staffing,” he said. That makes it difficult to always live up to the ideal way of the doing things, he said.
First-generation ALM offerings were “the software equivalent of having multiple screens on your desk,” said Gartner analyst Jim Duggan. It’s no surprise, then, that the development teams that used them—or those that simply listened to toolmakers’ marketing claims—are skeptical about the next generation offerings. But the new ALM—sometimes referred to as ALM 2.0 [see box]—is not just talk, he said. “It is designed in a very different way.”
The suites de-emphasize individual tools for requirements, coding, testing and so forth. Instead, they are designed around a “common stack of control data,” Duggan continued, where the tools fit in around that data. That common set of data is most often achieved through the use of a single repository, which provides different views of the same information, depending on whether the user of that data is concerned with requirements, coding, testing, and so forth. “It is a single view of the truth as opposed to multiple copies of the truth.”
Forrester’s Schwaber put it another way: “ALM is the connection between the tools, not the tools themselves.”
Voke analyst Theresa Lanowitz did not disagree, but her vision of ALM 2.0 includes line of business professionals, not just analysts, coders and testers. The distinction is important because it places the responsibility for application development with department that will actually rely on the software to conduct business, she said. “The line of business says, ‘This is the project we want [to develop], and IT is working with us on it.’”
Under that model, IT reports to the line of business, enabling IT to become part of a profit center, instead of continuing to be seen as a cost center. The new setup allows enterprise development organizations to achieve with the same level of efficiency as a commercial software company, Lanowitz said. “Large enterprises often have 200 developers working on a project. Commercial software companies have five developers working on the same size project. It’s so mind boggling to me.”
Also central to the new ALM concept is reporting, said Steve Dykstra, a product management director for ALM toolmaker Compuware. “Management is asking for a deeper set of metrics.” Reports can show not only what percentage of a project is complete, or how many people are working on a project, but also which projects have the highest degree of risk and complexity.
“It’s really about getting that information the right people when they need it, without bludgeoning them with data [they don’t need],” said Gartner’s Duggan. The new ALM offerings can automatically create meaningful reports, without requiring tool users to stop work and enter information about the activity at hand. For instance, as a developer checks code in and out and makes changes, history is automatically collected against the work item, he said. “Developers don’t need reporting and metrics to do their jobs. But the team needs them,” he added. “When the [business] user says, ‘What the heck is this?’ you need to be able to trace [the feature] back to the requirement.”
Buyers and sellers alike knew that early ALM was all about buying the right set of integrated tools from a single provider. The new ALM acknowledges that particular approach never gained traction with customers. “It’s unrealistic,” said Borland’s Jackson. Customers have made investments in software from more than one provider, and they are not going to rip and replace. If they want to use Telelogic DOORS, for example, instead of Borland’s own requirements tool, Caliber, with Borland’s ALM offering, so be it, Jackson said.
Borland’s ALM strategy and forthcoming offering is based on that idea: letting customers plug in competitor’s tools if they want to. But even ALM toolmakers who aren’t embarking on that strategy acknowledge that the ability to do that is important. “You have to provide bridging, and an open API makes that possible,” said Ellyn Winters-Robinson, vice president of marketing for ALM toolmaker MKS. “It doesn’t matter whose tools you are using,” said IBM Rational’s Reddy. ALM toolmaker Serena Software echoed those views. Asked whether the ability to plug in competitors’ tool is important, senior director of product marketing Nathan Rawlins said: “Yes, the ability to do plug and play is part of the life cycle framework.”
There is a lot of churn as customers wait for toolmakers to deliver this more open ALM vision, said Forrester’s Schwaber. “And a lot of them aren’t optimistic anymore.” The ability for all parties to share data, and collaborate in a meaningful, way has been promoted for so long, said Gartner’s Duggan. “How do you introduce the tools that finally deliver on that vision—when you have talked about it for so long?”
Related Search Term(s): ALM
Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/31952