What needs to change for the application life cycle for the cloud?

By Alexandra Weber Morales

September 23, 2011 — (Page 1 of 8)

Because cloud computing depends on utility access to compute cycles, components and tools, it's arguable that you needn’t change much about your process in order to start coding.

“I think, naturally, people will assume whatever life-cycle approach they have in place would be applied to the cloud, but they could be missing a big opportunity,” said John Rhoton, author of "Cloud Computing Architected" and "Cloud Computing Explained: Implementation Handbook for Enterprises."

“You have the opportunity to completely revisit your testing processes or deployment approach,” he added.

But building on cloud platforms is more than just a timesaver. With a future so bright, developers run the risk of frittering efforts across platform silos without seeing a viable return. While a little free play is fine, it’s important to remember that elasticity should be an overarching conceit.

“You don’t need anything to get started; you can develop the next Google or Salesforce with no resources," said Rhoton. "You’re getting all of this access, so presumably that’s what your goal is, to get a lot of use out of it."

But above all, you’ll want to be agile. Life-cycle tools can help you squeeze the most out of each stage of application development.

Project and portfolio management
Thanks to an increasingly distributed, global workforce and the experience of working on modularized, often open-source projects, developers have become accustomed to how cloud application-building feels. So have those who seek to wrangle them: project managers and team leaders. That’s why agile project management and requirements discovery tools have been using the software-as-a-service model for several years now.

As a reaction to the heavy waterfall processes of the past, the extreme programming or lean concepts of iterative prototyping rather than design-first were ideal for the SaaS business model. If you’re looking for tools in this space, AccuRev, Rally and ThoughtWorks Mingle come to mind for agile, developer-led teams.

At a higher level, portfolio management and governance concerns can be managed with SaaS ALM offerings that tap not only into development metrics such as successful builds, tests, releases or defect rates, but also enterprise financials, human resources, governance, risk and compliance systems. CA Clarity PPM is an example of an existing portfolio management product that has added applications to the Force.com platform and the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

Related Search Term(s): ALM, cloud

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