A Disciplined Approach To Healthy Software
Experts offer up advice for making life-cycle management work
By Jennifer deJong
June 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 6)
Watch out for trouble around handoffs. Apply agile ideas. Run your shop like a business. Don’t expect to change everything overnight.
That’s a high-level summary of the advice offered by analysts, consultants and tool makers when asked how best to manage large application development efforts, where dozens of team members work across disparate locations.
“Application life-cycle management has never been easy, or automatic,” said Upside Research analyst David Kelly. “It takes discipline and effort to put a strong ALM process in place, and the drive toward distributed development simply increases the challenge.”
To help development managers achieve that discipline, SD Times asked more than 15 experts to weigh in with best practices for seven stages of the application life cycle: requirements, architecture, code, build, test, deploy and maintain.
Some key themes emerged from their responses. First, while each stage of the life cycle focuses on a single activity, it is critical to define each stage in terms of its relationship to the other stages, the experts said. This idea is fundamental to the definition of ALM itself, said Forrester analyst Carey Schwaber. “ALM is any best practice that connects those stages.” The management of the application life cycle is about making sure the stages are in correspondence, she said.
“Don’t think of them as separate stages, but focus on the coordination [among them],” added CollabNet CEO Bill Portelli. Each stakeholder is involved in every stage, but the nature of their concerns differs, he said.
ALM IS AGILE
ALM isn’t about building software in one long sequential cycle, where one stage is completed before the next begins, the experts said. Ideas from agile programming, such as writing software in short stints, are central to ALM best practices, even for development teams that have not adopted officially agile methods such as Extreme Programming or Scrum.
“The serial way of working has been shown to be ineffective,” noted IBM practice leader for agile development Scott Ambler. A better approach is to do a little of each thing every single day: some analysis, some design, some coding, some testing and so forth, he said.
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