HP's new ALM 11 helps guide IT through shifting landscape of modern application development and service requirements

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona the week of November 29, 2010. We're here to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations, making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

To learn more about HP’s application life-cycle management (ALM) news -- and its customer impact from the conference -- please welcome Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Product Marketing for HP applications. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Sarbiewski: The legacy approach is not going to be the right path for delivering modern applications. We’ve been hard at work for a couple of years now, recasting and re-inventing our portfolio to match the modern approach to software, going through them one-by-one.

You’ve got changes in how you are organized. You’ve got changes in the approach that people are taking. And, you’ve got brand-new technology in the mix and new ways of actually constructing applications. All of these hold great promise, but great challenges too. That's clashing with the legacy approach that people in the past took in building software.

We talk to our customers about this all of the time. It boils down to the same old changes that we see sort of every 10 years. A new technology comes into play with all its great opportunity and problems, and we revisit how we do this. In the last several years, it’s been about how do I get a global team going, focused on potentially a brand-new process and approach.

What are the new technologies that everybody is employing? We’ve got rich Internet technologies, Web 2.0 approaches and our technology is there. For composite applications, we’ve built a variety of capabilities that help people understand how to make the performance right with those technologies, keep the security and the quality high, while keeping the speed up.

So everything from how do we do performance testing in that environment to testing things that don’t have interfaces. And how do we understand the impact of change on the systems like that? We’ve built capabilities that help people move to Agile as a process approach, things like fundamentally changing how they can do exploratory testing, and how they can bring in automation much sooner in the process of performance, quality, and security.

Lastly, we’ve been very focused on creating a single, unified system that scales to tens of thousands of users. And, it’s a web-based system, so that wherever the team members are located, even if they don’t work for you, they can become a harmonious part of the overall team, 24-hour cycles around the globe. It speeds everything up, but it also keeps everyone on the same page. It’s that kind of anytime, anywhere access that’s just required in this modern approach to software.

How is software really supported?

When I talk to customers, I ask them, how they're supporting software. If we talk about software delivery, it's fundamentally a team sport. There isn't a single stakeholder that does it all. They all have to play and do their part.

When they tell me they’ve got requirements management in Microsoft Word, Excel, or maybe even a requirements tool, and they have a bug database for this, test management for that, and this tool here, on the surface it looks like they fitted everybody with a tool and it must be good. Right?

The problem is that the work is not isolated. You might be helping each individual stakeholder out a little bit, but you're not helping the team.

The problem is that the work is not isolated. You might be helping each individual stakeholder out a little bit, but you're not helping the team. The team’s work relates to each other. When requirements get created or changed, it's the ripple effect. What tests have to be modified or newly created? What code then has to be modified? When that code gets checked in, what tests has to be run? It’s the ripple effect of the work we talk about it as workflow automation. It's also the insight to know exactly where you are.

When the real question of how far am I on this project or what quality level am I at -- am I ready to release -- needs to be answered in the context of everyone’s work, I have to understand how many requirements are tested? Is my highest priority stuff working against what code?

So, you see the team aspects of it. There is so much latency in a traditional approach. Even if each player has their own tool, it's how we get that latency out and the finger-pointing and the mis-communication that also results. We take all that out of that process and, lo and behold, we see our customers cutting their delivery times in half, dropping their defect rates by 80 percent or more, and actually doing this more cheaply with fewer people.

In requirements management, one of the big new things that we’ve done is allow the import of business process models (BPMs) into the system. Now, we’ve got the whole business process flow that’s pulled right into the system. It can be pulled right from the systems like Eris or anything that’s putting in the standard business process modeling language (BPML) right into the system.

Business processes-focused

Now, everyone who accesses ALM 11 can see the actual business process. We can start articulating that this is the highest priority flow. This step of the business process, maybe it's check credit or something like that, is an external thing but it's super-important. So, we’ve got to make sure we really test the heck out of that thing. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

Everyone is aligned around what we’re doing, and all the requirements can be articulated in that same priority. The beautiful thing now about having all this in one place is that work connects to everything else. It connects to the test I set up, the test I run, the defects I find, and I can link it even back to the code, because we work with the major development tools like Visual Studio, Eclipse, and CollabNet.

It's hugely important that we connect into the world of developers. They're already comfortable with their tools. We just want to integrate with that work, and that’s really what we’ve done. They become part of the workflow process. They become part of the traceability we have.

What we hear from our customers is that the coolest new technology they want to work with is also the most problematic from a performance standpoint.

The bottom line is that the coolest new Web 2.0 front ends can now be very easily performance tested.

Modern requirements

We went back to the drawing board and reinvented how well we can understand these great new Web 2.0 technologies, in particular Ajax, which is really pervasive out there. We now can script from within the browser itself.

The big breakthrough there is if the browser can understand it, we can understand it. Before, we were sort of on the outside looking in, trying to figure out what a slider bar really did, and when a slider bar was moved what did that mean.

Now, we can generate a very readable script. I challenge anybody. Even a businessperson can understand, when they're clicking through an application, what gets created for the performance testing script.

We parameterize it. We can script logic there. We can suggest alternate steps. The bottom line is that the coolest new Web 2.0 front ends can now be very easily performance tested. So we don't end up in that situation where it's great, you did a beautiful rich job, and it's such a compelling interface, but only works when 10 people are hitting the application. We've got to fix that problem.

It speeds everything up, because it's so readable and quick. And it just works seamlessly. We've tested against the top 40 websites, and they are out there out using all this great new technology and it's working flawlessly.

Lots of pieces

If you think about a composite application, it's really made up of lots of pieces. There are application services or components. The idea is that if I’ve got something that works really well and I can reuse it as part of and combine it with maybe a few other things or in a couple of new pieces and I get new capability, I've saved money. I’ve moved faster and I'm delivering innovation to the business in a much better, quicker way and it should be rock-solid, because I can trust these components.

The challenge is, I'm not making up software made of lots of bits and pieces. I need to test every individual aspect of it. I need to test how they communicate together and I need to do end-to-end testing.

If I try to create composite apps and reuse all this technology, but it takes me ten times longer to test, I haven’t achieved my ultimate goal which was cheaper, faster and still high quality. So Unified Functional Testing is addressing that very challenge.

We've got Service Test which actually is incredible visual canvas for how I can test things that don't have an interface. One of the big challenges with something that doesn't have an interface is that I can't test it manually, because there are no buttons to push. It's all kind of under the covers. But, we have a wonderful, easy, brand-new reinvented tool here called Service Test that takes care of all that. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

That’s connected and integrated with our functional testing product that allows you to test everything end-to-end in the GUI level. The beautiful thing about our approach is you get to do that end-to-end, GUI level type of testing and the non-GUI stuff all from one solution and you report out all the testing that you get done.

Bring in a lot of automation to speed it up, keep the quality high and the time down low and you get to see it all kind of come together in one place.

So again, bring in a lot of automation to speed it up, keep the quality high and the time down low and you get to see it all kind of come together in one place.

Sprinter is not even a reinvention. It's brand-new thinking about how we can do manual testing in an Agile world. Think of that Instant-On world. It's such a big change when people move to an Agile delivery approach. Everyone on the team now plays kind of a derivative role of what they used to do. Developers take a part of testing, and quality folks have to jump in super-early. It's just a huge change.

What Sprinter brings is a toolset for that tester, for that person who is jumping in, getting right after the code to give immediate feedback, and it's a toolset that allows that tester to automatically figure out what test apps are supposed to go through to drop in data instead of typing it in. I don't have to type it anymore. I can just use an Excel spreadsheet and I can start ripping through screens and tests really fast, because I'm not testing whether it can take the input. I'm testing whether it processes it right. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

Cool tools

And when I come across an error, there's a tool that allows me to capture those screens, annotate them, and send that back to the developer. What’s our goal when we find a defect? The goal is to explain exactly what was done to create the defect and exactly where it is. There are a whole bunch of cool tools around that.

The last point I’d make about this is called Mirror Testing. It’s super-important. It’s imperative that things like websites actually work across the variety of browsers and operating environments and operating systems, but testing all those combinations is very painful.

Mirror Testing allows the system to work in the background, while someone is testing, say on XP and Internet Explorer, five other systems, different combinations will be driven on the exact same test. I'm sitting in front of it, doing my testing, and in the background, Safari is being tested or Firefox. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

If there is an error on that system, I see it, I mark it, and I send it right away, essentially turning one tester into six. It's really great breakthrough thinking on the part of R&D here and a huge productivity bump.

What we hear from our customers is that they really do want their lives to be simplified, and the conclusion that they have come to in many cases is Post-It Notes, emails, and Word docs. It seems simpler at first and then it quickly falls apart at scale. Conversely, if you have tools that you can only work with in one particular environment, and most enterprises have a lot of those, you end up with a complex mess.

Companies have said, "I have a set of development tools. I probably have some SAP, maybe some Oracle. I’ve got built-in .NET, with Microsoft. I do some Eclipse stuff and I do Java. I’ve got those but if you can work with those and if you can help me get a common approach to requirements, to managing tests, functional performance, security, manage my overall project, and integrate with those tools, you’ve made my life easier."

When we talk about being environment agnostic, that’s what we mean. Our goal is to support better than anyone else in the market the variety of environments that enterprises have. The developers are happy where they are. We want them as part of the process, but we don’t want to yank them out of their environment to participate. So our goal again is to support those environments and connect into that world without disrupting the developer.

And, the other piece that you mentioned is just as important. Most customers aren’t taking one uniform approach to software. They know they’ve got different types of projects. I’ve got some big infrastructure software projects that I am not going to do all the time and I am not going to release every 30 days and a waterfall approach or a sequential approach is perfect for that.

Rock solid

I want to make sure it’s rock solid, that I can afford to take that type of an approach, and it's the right approach. For a whole host of other projects, I want to be much more agile. I want to do 60-day releases or 90-day releases or even more, and it makes sense for those projects. What I don’t want, they tell us, I don’t want every team inventing their own approach for Waterfall, Agile, or custom approaches. I want to be able to help the teams follow a best-practice approach.

As far as the workflow, they can customize it. They can have an Agile best practice, a Waterfall best practice, and even another one if they want. The system helps the team do the right thing and get a common language, common approach, all that stuff. That’s the process kind of agnostic belief we have.

The great news is that today you can download all the solutions that we’ve talked about for trials. We have some online demos that you can check out as well. There are a lot of white papers and other things. You can literally pull the software 30 minutes from now and see what I'm talking about.

On the licensing side, we believe that the simplest approach is a concurrent license, which we have on most of the products that we’ve got here. For all the modules that we’ve been talking about, if you have a concurrent license to the system, you can get any of the modules. And, it’s a nice floating license. You don’t have to count up everybody in your shop and figure out exactly who is going to be using what module.

The concurrent license model is very flexible, nice approach. It’s one we’ve had in the past. We're carrying it forward and we’ll look to continue to simplify and make it easier for customers to understand all the great capabilities and how to simply license so that they can get their teams to their modules for the capability they need.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

You may also be interested in:

• Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on business and governments
  
  
• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications
  
  
• Automating the managed application lifecycle helps Delta Air Lines better deliver critical business applications
  
  
• How to automate ALM: Conclusions from new HP book on gaining improved business applications as a process

HP rolls out ALM 11 in Barcelona to expand managed automation for modern applications

Barcelona -- In the midst of what it calls a new wave of application modernization in the enterprise, HP on Tuesday rolled out the latest version of its application lifecycle management (ALM) platform here at the Software Universe conference.

The Application Lifecycle Management 11 platform works to automate application modernization from requirements management through quality and performance. HP sees this as an important innovation in a market where Forrester Consulting predicts 69 percent of IT decision-makers have earmarked 25 percent of their annual IT budget for application modernization—and 30 percent will dedicate over half their budget to the cause. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“Sixty-seven percent of organizations that have kick-started application modernization projects are failing,” says Jonathan Rende, vice president and general manager of the Applications Solutions business for HP Software & Solutions division. “Application teams that have to build, provision and create new critical business processes can’t keep up because they are relying on the old ways of doing things instead of the new way.”

HP application transformation

The ALM 11 platform and software solutions are part of that “new way.” Components of the HP Application Transformation solutions, these tools work to help enterprises gain control over aging applications and inflexible processes that challenge innovation and agility -- by governing their responsiveness and pace of change. It’s all part of the Instant-On Enterprise that embeds technology into everything it does. ALM 11 essentially automates workflow processes across multiple teams. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

“Applications are central to everything CIOs are doing right now,” Rende says. “It’s literally how companies are differentiating themselves -- and doing so in more efficient and effective ways with more value added. ALM 11 creates a single, unified system that allows business analysts, developers, security professionals, quality professionals and performance professionals to collaborate.”

By establishing this set of criteria, everybody can see what is coming and what the status is, and why there are changes if there are changes.

[Read an interview with HP's Mark Sarbiewski on the uses and benefits of the new ALM portfolio.]

Rende also points to benefits such as risk-based decisions of application releases via ALM Project Planning and Tracking capabilities, rapid application delivery with HP Agile Accelerator 4.0, reduced business risk from application failures, and automatic import of business process models (BPM) into ALM’s Requirements Management to visualize business process flows and augment textual requirements.

Rend notes that HP isn’t working in a vacuum, either. “Everybody has a mix of different applications and environments. Many times they are cobbling them together and integrating because the business processes that are critical cut across many different systems,” Rende says. “Our solution is agnostic to the technologies.”

Release Management

Another major focus of ALM 11 is Release Management -- the ability for program and project managers to establish milestones and criteria and measurements in real-time. The module works to answer the questions, “What’s coming?” and “Is it ready?” or “Has it been tested successfully?”

“Many requirements for new apps come from production, and DevOps sit on that line between operations and applications,” Rende says. “By establishing this set of criteria, release milestones, and GANTT charts, everybody can see what is coming and what the status is, and why there are changes if there are changes.”

HP ALM platform also offers new versions of HP Quality Center and Performance Center 11. These solutions work to help simplify and automate application quality and performance validation to lower operational costs, freeing up investments to innovating applications in the delivery phase.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

You may also be interested in:

• Dave Shirk details how HP's Instant-On Enterprise initiative takes aim at shifting demands on business and governments
  
  
• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications
  
  
• Automating the managed application lifecycle helps Delta Air Lines better deliver critical business applications
  
  
• How to automate ALM: Conclusions from new HP book on gaining improved business applications as a process

The adaptive web: Helping to bridge the CIO-CMO divide

This guest post comes courtesy of Dr. Scott Brave, co-founder and CTO of Baynote, a provider of digital marketing optimization solutions. He can be reached at brave@baynote.com.

By Dr. Scott Brave

CIO and CMO. Until very recently, many still believed these two roles couldn’t be more extreme in their differences. The stereotypical CMO was creative and guided by gut feel, whereas the CIO was steadfast, risk averse and driven by empirical evidence.

The emergence of the real-time web and its impact on customer expectations has pulled these two seemingly polar opposite disciplines much closer together. Real-time services like Twitter, Facebook and improved behavioral targeting technologies are pushing consumer expectations for instant, extremely personalized experiences to an all-time high.

This trend has forced the CIO and CMO to work in lockstep on digital marketing initiatives aimed at staying as close as possible to what the customer wants.

However, the reality is that while both sides understand their shared goals depend on working with the other, the relationship between the CIO and CMO is more often not a happy marriage. According to the CMO Council’s recent CMO-CIO Alignment Imperative report, there is a good amount of consensus among CMOs and CIOs on the central role of technology in improving the customer experience, but neither group feels like they are getting the job done.

Biggest struggle

Their single biggest struggle has become all about figuring out ways to adapt the experience – across the web as well as via mobile and email – to seemingly insatiable user expectations. This sentiment is consistent with recent M&A activity that signals the importance of web optimization technology: Adobe acquired Omniture last September; and IBM has gobbled up CoreMetrics, Unica, and most recently, Netezza for $1.7B.

The reality, however, is that current optimization approaches are still very manual and provide a rear-view mirror look at customer intent, making it impossible to target the customer in an accurate and scalable way. Alas, the CIO/CMO dilemma continues.

What we need is to build a smarter approach that allows companies to adapt to their customers’ needs in real-time.

What we need is to build a smarter approach that allows companies to adapt to their customers’ needs in real-time. The concept of collective intelligence, which I’ll address below, will be critical to achieving this vision -- something I like to think of as an “adaptive web.” That is, a digital experience that is always relevant and based on users’ current intent and interests. It also must be device-agnostic, especially important given the increased mobility of the online experience -- a challenge analyst firm Forrester calls “the Splinternet.”

The adaptive web is in fact central to what Gartner calls “Context-Aware Computing”, the idea that social analytics and computing will produce knowledge about individual context and preferences, allowing companies to predict and serve them what they want. According to Gartner, this model adapts interactions with the customer based on context, in contrast to today’s experience which is very reactive.

So, how close are we to building a truly end-to-end adaptive web?

To no surprise, there are numerous technical and psychological challenges for building an adaptive web. Namely, I see three primary roadblocks:

• Privacy Issues: To deliver adaptive experiences, we have to pay attention to what people are doing online in the first place. Different users have varying levels of comfort. We’ll have to find some sort of middle ground where the value of an adaptive experience greatly outweighs users’ privacy concerns.
  
  
• Deciding on the Method: Second, there’s determining the approach itself. Do we need a “metalayer” over the web? Some sort of toolbar or plug-in that could connect users’ entire web experiences across devices? Do ISPs need to get involved at the network level to watch every site users’ visit and how they engage with it? These are all options to consider – some more realistic than others - but the path is murky at best at this point.
  
  
• Determining Users’ Intents: The third obstacle is the biggest obstacle of all: pure science. It’s not a trivial problem to automatically pinpoint and serve up an experience based on a user’s current intent and context. As someone who has devoted his life’s work to studying human/computer interaction, I can’t emphasize this enough. Predicting what people want and need, and adapting their web experience in real-time is perhaps one of the remaining “big picture” challenges facing technologists.
  

Collective intelligence

Let’s revisit collective intelligence and its role in making the adaptive web a reality. Collective intelligence refers to the process of gathering insight from a group of like-minded individuals online, often implicitly, based on their shared navigation and engagement patterns. A central concept of collective intelligence is to aggregate behaviors of the silent majority of visitors across the spectrum of digital channels, augment that information with the expertise of super-users and provide the most relevant information that meets every individual user’s goals.

Not doing so will have profound implications for their organizations, most notably lost revenues and customer loyalty.

An obvious benefit to using collective intelligence is one of mere scale: it enables machines to draw conclusions about an individual's current intent based on the knowledge and experiences of the larger community. It also gives us the power to efficiently deliver automated and real-time experiences to users. This would be very difficult within any user-by-user scenario, which again poses enormous difficulties in matters of scale.

The CIO and CMO understand why their success depends on better IT/marketing alignment. Now, the challenge will be for them to deliver. While there’s no silver bullet, I believe collective intelligence has the potential to help them form a much more harmonious and strategic partnership. CIOs and CMOs must formulate their strategies for collective intelligence, context-aware computing and other technologies enabling the adaptive web right away.

Not doing so will have profound implications for their organizations, most notably lost revenues and customer loyalty.

This guest post comes courtesy of Dr. Scott Brave, co-founder and CTO of Baynote, a provider of digital marketing optimization solutions. He can be reached at brave@baynote.com.

You may also be interested in:

• Why HTML5 enables more businesses to deliver more apps to more mobile devices with greater ease
  
  
• Analysts define business value and imperatives for cloud-based B2B commerce
  
  
• Web data services -- here's why text-based content access and management plays crucial role in real-time BI

ThinPrint works to take cloud printing to mainstream

With companies putting more applications and data into Internet clouds, cloud printing is gaining momentum in the enterprise.

Vendors large and small are getting into the game. HP has made major announcements while Google has hinted at the future. Apple has begun services for iOS devices. Smaller companies like HubCast and ThinPrint have entered the fray. Yet, for all the attention, though, cloud printing is still not mainstream.

BriefingsDirect recently caught up with Thorsten Hesse, manager of Innovative Products for ThinPrint, to discuss the business drivers of cloud computing, the various options available, and the obstacles to wider-spread adoption of the technology.

BriefingsDirect: What are the business drivers of cloud printing adoption?

Hesse: In general, talking about printing is quite boring for most people. But people want to print. They need to print. They don’t want to talk about it, but they want to use it. They just want it to work.

Companies spend a lot of money for new printers, for printer management and print driver administration, for unused print outs, unnecessary paper and toner consumption, and for support and help desk. Printing is one of the most cost-intensive things in IT. Many companies also don’t want to be locked in with a specific vendor.

Increasing use

Another aspect is the increasing use of cloud applications and services. How do you print from cloud offerings like Salesforce or Google Apps? Mostly you create a PDF. Well, then you need a device that can print PDFs. Additionally, the use of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices becomes more and more common, and these devices can‘t do that, or only in limited quality.

Altogether, there are at least six business drivers for cloud printing:

• Printing is one of the most cost intensive IT services—and cloud printing can save cost and enhance productivity at the same time.
  
• Printing technology today depends highly on printer manufacturers.
  
• Companies want print on demand.
  
• Companies use cloud applications, very often unplanned.
  
• Employees are becoming increasingly mobile.
  
• Employees use new types of devices.

BriefingsDirect: What are the different options for cloud printing in terms of delivery?

Hesse: There’re three different delivery models. First, there is private cloud software. The first delivery model is that we sell software to our customers that they install in their environment, for example in their data center or on an Amazon server in the cloud.

This might sound far off, but as soon as customers manage their internal desktops from the cloud with Microsoft Intune, it will be a logical step to do the same with the printers.

They buy, own, and control the software. The other end of the spectrum is a pure cloud printing service. And then in the middle we've got the hybrid cloud, where some parts are run internally in the private cloud and others in the public cloud.

BriefingsDirect: Is cloud printing secure? What makes is it secure?

Hesse: First of all, the user can print content without needing to store it on the device, which brings all the advantages of central data storage -- secure and updated data in one place, no files lost when device is lost, and availability of service. The user can trigger the print job to the printer. He can also identify the printer.

BriefingsDirect: How is cloud printing evolving?

Hesse: Our solution is evolving in many directions. On top of offering print management as a software product that the customer can purchase and install internally, we’ll offer it as a cloud service. This will be a public cloud service. Customers can run it from the cloud. They can then control their internal printing environment from the cloud.

This might sound far off, but as soon as customers manage their internal desktops from the cloud with Microsoft Intune, it will be a logical step to do the same with the printers. This will evolve into a complete print management solution that can then be used not only to control the printing environment, but to build in policies to enhance it along the way.

BriefingsDirect: What is holding businesses back from adopting cloud printing?

Hesse: They mostly don’t know what’s possible, as the discussion is fogged by limited public cloud printing solutions.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

You may also be interested in:

• HP eyes automated apps development, 'standardized' private cloud creation with integrated CloudStart package
  
  
• Financial services firms look to cloud, grid, and cluster to allay fears over data explosion, says survey
  
  
• Cloud computing's ultimate value depends on open PaaS models to avoid applications and data lock-in

InfoBoom seeks US IT pros to take telephone survey, get stipend

The Infoboom, a site to which I regularly contribute for pay, is doing some research to learn more about how IT and business technology professionals meet their information needs.

The research involves a one-hour telephone interview and they are offering $100 American Express gift certificates to people who complete the survey.

Apply to be interviewed here.

You must be based in the U.S. and you must have significant involvement with business technology, but other than that they are pretty flexible.

This is not a marketing pitch and nobody's going to try to sell you anything. IBM, which underwrites the site, just really wants to know more about what its audience needs. Thanks!

How to automate ALM: Conclusions from new HP book on gaining improved business applications as a process

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers new methods and insights for dramatic business services delivery improvement.

The topic of ALM will be a big one at next week's HP Software Universe conference in Barcelona. In anticipation, join us as we explore application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices for overall business services delivery improvement.

In this discussion, the last in a series of three, we underscore the conclusions from the forthcoming book and explain how organizations can begin now to change how they deliver and maintain applications in a fast-changing world.

Complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches. In the forthcoming book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors evaluate the role and impact of automation and management over an application's lifecycle, as well as delve into the need to gain better control over applications through a holistic governance perspective.

In our first podcast, we focused on the role and impact of automation and management of applications, and emphasized the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

The second discussion in the series looked at how an enterprise, Delta Air Lines, moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from those applications.

Finally, we're here now with the book’s authors to explore their conclusions. Please join me in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Sarbiewski: The life of an application is generally the same for all companies. There is a spark of an idea: "We need this. We need software to help us do something in the business."

We make an investment decision somehow. We may do this ad hoc. We may do it based on who screams the loudest. But somehow a decision gets made. We build something somehow. We spec it, build it, release it, run it, poorly or not, and hopefully, although certainly not always, eventually we replace it, retire it, and so forth.

We wanted to take a slightly different approach to how we thought about maturity models. There are lots of them in the industry, not so much around ALM, but in sub-disciplines or in different areas. Our focus was the business outcomes that you see at different levels.

We built out a model for ALM maturity, and it’s in the book.

... We see pressure from the business to change how we do things and the technologies we use. From the business side, you see it in a variety of ways. You see, "Oh, it’s the consumerization of IT, and what I see in my consumer world I want in IT. I see this all moving fast and I don’t feel my business moving." You see that pressure.

But, you absolutely see pressure to change from the bottom-up, from the teams themselves. We want to work in a different way. We want to be able to execute faster. The whole move of agile has been, in large part, if not primarily built, then driven from development and delivery teams up. So, there is a huge motivation there.

If you can understand the results that you are seeing, that ought to help you figure out where you could be. What we've seen is a progression from the spectrum of companies, ... [many] have fairly immature processes.

We see people just getting started, and they have a relatively ad hoc, narrow, point tool, with lots of manual work. It doesn’t mean they are never successful, but results vary highly. They're very mixed. Some project teams are great, and it all depends on the project team, and the next one may stink.

So our idea around maturity -- and tying it to outcomes -- is the results that we see. ... It all comes back to the results. What kind of results am I seeing? If you look at the model in the book, it’s pretty easy to peg yourself as to where you are and the kinds of benefits you'd see from moving up that maturity curve.

There’s a lot of pride when you see the metrics go in the right way. The feedback that I've seen for our clients that do this really well is where the business comes back and says, "Oh, my God. The responsiveness is incredible. Even if I'm not getting the massive stuff that I used to get once every two years, I'm seeing movement on a regular basis, and I love it." And lot of clients that we talk to are really fired up about that.

What we hear from our clients is that things are hyper-competitive and that technology, in particular software and applications, is a huge competitive advantage. So, our ability to move fast and beat the competitors to the punch with capability is enormously important.

More of a scorecard

Hipps: We configured this model trying deliberately not to be ultra-prescriptive. There are many heavy-duty models that do exist, and people can dig into those to their heart’s content. This is as much a maturity scorecard as anything.

One of the examples that you might see or one of the ways you might begin to engage yourself is something like defect leakage. Defect leakage refers to the number of defects that you discover in live in the application that you could have caught earlier.

We have some figures that show that the average is in the neighborhood of 40 percent of application defects that leak into production and are discovered in live. They could have been caught earlier. It may be little higher than 40 percent, which is a fairly shocking number.

But on the high end, the world-class customers we worked with, see less than 5 percent of defects working their way into production. So right off the bat there, you're talking an 80 percent-plus drop in the number of defects that you're experiencing in a live environment, with all the attendant cost savings, brand improvement, and good will in the business that you would expect.

That’s one example of the kind of thing that you can look at, tease out, and begin to get a sense of where might I sit maturity wise. From that, you can potentially take a cue as to where is it that I want to start, where is it that I want to make the biggest investment, as I look to make myself more mature.

There are hosts of sophisticated KPIs we can design for ourselves, but one of the key ones was, "I want to know what the business thinks of us, and whether we are trending in the right direction."

Speaking from the application domain, our friends in the agile communities have been the leading champions of this notion. Our default stand [as development teams] was one of being change-averse.

By that, I mean that there was this whole contractual relationship with business. You tell us what you need, and we're going to document it as best as we can, down to having all the semicolons in the right place.

"We're going to break out the quill pens and ink our signatures. Forever shall it be, and if you change anything here, we're going to hit you with the request for change, and it will go through a cycle of six weeks and maybe we'll agree to it," etc., etc. The longest time that was the mindset. You can look at that and say it's awful, but when I had far fewer applications, and they took far longer to build, it was just the way of the world.

The recognition today for all of the reasons we've talked about in this podcast and others, our applications are everywhere. They're always on. There is nothing I can do in a business that isn't going to touch the application. It fundamentally means, we need to sweep from the table, that notion of being change-averse. Instead, we need to be in a position of embracing change. We do need to be change-ready.

The leading traits

As Mark said, we need to be architected and engineered, from our people process technology perspective, to put ourselves in a position to be that way. In the book, we talk a bit about some of the principles we think come into play for change ready organizations. But, that's why it is one of the leading traits, the leading principles, in world-class organizations.

This could be a mantra of sorts: Think big, start small, scale quickly. The basic idea of think big is the idea that you want to spend some time making sure that you’ve all got a shared vision of where you want to be, and we talk a bit about whether that was a maturity model -- these principles of predictability and repeatability, etc.

Hopefully we've set at least some suggested guidelines for constructing what your end state might look like. But, this point about thinking big is that, as we all know, certainly in IT but probably anywhere, it's every easy to fall into a state of analysis paralysis. We've got to figure out exactly the right metrics to decide exactly what we're going to be. We've got to figure out precisely what our time-line is.

We sort of can borrow from our friends in agile, who have said that you've got to understand the perimeter of what it is you want to accomplish, but still it's bound to change. Those perimeters are bound to shift. You're bound to discover things about yourselves, your organizations, what's feasible, and what's not in the process of actually trying to get there.

It's important to set yourself an objective and make sure it's a shared objective. It's just as critical to get going to not fall into a trap of endless planning and reconsideration of plans.

So, it's important to set yourself an objective and make sure it's a shared objective. It's just as critical to get going to not fall into a trap of endless planning and reconsideration of plans.

If, you then pluck the low-hanging fruit, the easy things we could do starting this week, starting tomorrow, to advance us at least generally toward these ends, this end objective, that's great. Then, it becomes a matter of just continuing to move, scale, and adapt.

Somewhere, we make the point that, as an application team, certainly at least as an application member, I cared a lot more about measurable progress, seeing things actually advancing and getting better. Then, I cared less about how shiningly brilliant the end-state was going to be or exactly how we were going to get there.

Unconscious sabotage

Sarbiewski: I spent a number of years in a former life doing process change for companies. There were some trade secretes in the firm I worked with. They recognized some unchanging facts that that people can consciously or unconsciously sabotage the greatest plans, any process you want, or any kind of a change.

You have to start with people. It does involve all the people-process-technology in that order, but it's the people considerations. Do we have that shared vision? Who are the skeptics? Where do we think this could go wrong? Are we committed to getting there?

There were some questions we’d as we were embarking on making this change. First of all we said, what project or what pilot -- if we did these changes on it -- would people in the organization say, "If it works for that project, it will work for us as an organization."

So, find that visible pilot project, not one that’s an exception. Don’t find one where there are four developers and they are in the same room. If you try something new, people can say, "Well, of course, it worked for that, but that’s so atypical." So, find that project.

Beyond that, find the champion who is really respected in the organization, but skeptical of the change. We would go looking for one or two people who were open-minded enough to really give it a go, but maybe steeped in how we’ve done it, and have been very successful in how we’ve done it. Then, people can say, "That’s the kind of project we do, so you need to be able to make it work there. If Joe or Mary or whoever it is, if they buy into and it works for them, I believe."

The one other thing I’d say is start thinking about those types of metrics, those cross-silo and lifecycle-oriented goals and metrics.

Maybe, let's reward jointly the operations and the dev teams, if they’ve met those customer satisfaction goals, those service level agreements (SLAs), and those low counts of defects in production. You start to create a different dynamic, when you think more about lifecycle goals and cross-team goals.

Hipps: The spirit of this book, and probably the spirit of a lot of these kinds of books, ... If I have one hope, it’s that we haven’t been so pie-in-the-sky in our thinking that somebody reads this and says, "Yeah, nice idea, but it will never happen here."

So, that would be my hope -- somebody takes one single way that’s implementable in the near-term within their organization.

Sarbiewski: What I’m hoping is that in these hundred or so odd pages that executives in these enterprises that we're talking to have that opportunity to take just a couple hours and have somebody give them a chance to think about how important software is, and what the true life of an application is.

Once you start to go down that path and you start to say, wait a minute, 10, 15 years of evolving this capability, what does that mean? When things are live and I’ve got hot request from the business to make a change, what needs to happen? How much money will I spend on that?

The one "aha" moment is seeing that the 12 to 15 years matter, when I’m delivering value to the business and innovating for the business. In order to be successful during those 10 to 15 years, I will make different decisions when I build this thing. I will focus on a process.

I will build the automation to a different level, because I’ve stopped thinking that my job is done when I go live. If that’s truly the job, you’ll make a lot of shortcut decisions to get to go live. But, if you think bigger, you think about the full life of an application and what it delivers to the business.

All of a sudden, it makes a whole lot more sense to do things a bit differently, to set myself up for 10 years or 15 years of success with the business, as opposed to a moment when I can say, "Yup, I achieved a milestone."

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the third in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• New Book Explores Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle to Accelerate Delivery of Business Applications

• Automating the managed application lifecycle helps Delta Airlines deliver better business results
  
  
• Dave Shirk on how HP's Instant-On Enterprise takes aim at new demands on businesses, governments
  
  
• HP Shows Benefits from Successful Application Consolidation With Own Massive Global Supply Chain Project

Automating the managed application lifecycle helps Delta Airlines better deliver critical business applications

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers new methods and insights for dramatic business services delivery improvement.

The topic of ALM will be a big one at next week's HP Software Universe conference in Barcelona. In anticipation, join us as we explore a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers some new methods for overall business services delivery improvement.

Complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches. In the forthcoming book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors evaluate the role and impact of automation and management over an application's lifecycle, as well as delve into the need to gain better control over applications through a holistic governance perspective to help head-off poor applications productivity.

This is the second (read more about and access the first podcast) in the series of three podcasts on the "Application Lifecycle Management" book. We're here with the authors, but we are also here to learn about how one enterprise, Delta Air Lines, has moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality and impact and to better deliver real business results from those applications.

So please join me now welcoming our panel, David Moses, Quality Assurance Manager for Delta’s eCommerce IT Group, and John Bell, Senior Test Engineer in the eCommerce IT Group at Delta; book c0-author Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of marketing for HP Applications, and c0-author Brad Hipps, Senior Manager for Solution Marketing at HP Applications. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Sarbiewski: The headline for me is that, more than ever, business moves as software moves; as your website moves, as your ERP system is advanced, your supply chain, and your financials.

Businesses are driven so much by software now that it's really the long pole in the tent. Standing up infrastructure is a necessity. Potentially, it can be done really fast. How quickly can I innovate on my capabilities for my customers or my internal users?

So, business moves as software moves. When we look at how we've done over the last 10 or 15 years, I could sum it by saying that legacy applications and approaches are just too slow. Not only are they too slow, they are too costly. They're riddled with security holes, which are increasing the challenges out there.

So, we have this dynamic that the business needs to move faster. Software is a prime driver in innovating for the business, and where we've been is simply too slow. We need to rethink our approach across the board, because there is no one silver bullet. It really boils down to I have to leverage the latest technologies for things like reuse, where I get huge leverage for richer customer experiences that need those wonderful new web application technologies that we have.

I have new processes that I can leverage in forms of agile and iterative types of things. To keep the cost in line. I really want to be able to leverage global teams for flexible low cost, but expert resources around the globe. I want them acting as if they were all local, like a dynamic Tiger Team that was all local.

That’s a lot of change to make happen to serve the ultimate business needs. We took the opportunity to take a step back and ask how all these things come together and how you can blend this modern approach to really deliver what you need to deliver for the business.

Hipps: This is a chance to take a step back and have a bit of brain space to consider and contemplate a lot of things Mark just touched on -- what are these ramifications for my organization?

Nine times out of 10, most of us who are in IT developing applications, trying to get on top of what it is the business wants, don't generally have the luxury of taking a step back and asking has the ground shifted underneath my feet with regard to all the things I am now expected to do and the ways I am expected to do them, whether that’s process shifts, organizational shifts, or technology shifts.

Generally the case is that the ground has shifted. Am I equipped, organized, and oriented to respond effectively to all these changes? That’s one of the driving factors of the book and one of the hopes that gives people a chance to step back, contemplate what these changes have been, and also give a bit of guidance about how we might better get on top of these changes and really wring the benefit out of them that we had expected when we first began to make them.

Innovating for customers

Moses: The biggest thing that we have at Delta is to make sure that we innovate for our customers and give them the latest greatest ability to take control of their situation. If somebody wants to book a flight, they should be able to do it on any media they like.

We want them to be able to make it in as few clicks as possible and as little typing as possible. We really want to make it as convenient for the customer and through the entire experience from the inspiration, all the way to when they are back home. We want to deliver quality products to them.

That comes down to innovation and speed, because you can innovate for ever and never actually release the product. For us, getting it out the door is very, very important. Some of the things that we've heard already from Mark and Brad touch on the need to back away, get out the weeds, and look at your overall lifecycle to make sure that you can get that speed. A lot of times, if you're doing the status quo over and over again, you never realize how fast you can be. So, you raise your head up, look around, and try to make some big changes.

Complexity is always the enemy of speed and innovation, isn’t it? The idea is to make it as simple as possible by having one version of the truth. You really have to get to that point, a central repository of data, a central tool that everyone can use. We use Quality Center. We keep everything in that, requirements, tough cases, automation. We pull scripts and things from there for our test plans. We have one area with all that data, so all of our areas can come to that and pull that information.

Whenever somebody needs to start up a script or anything like that, they’ve got a library that they can pull from. They can bring it into their project. When they are done with their manual testing and they place their test plan back in the library, they can then take those pieces and immediately automate them.

Somebody once said they required a form to find out who they were going to, or what pieces they were going to automate. For us, if you have one version of the truth, you know when things are checked back in. You know when your test plan has been updated and your automation people can make that decision. So, it's about getting rid of all the clutter, reducing the complexity, having simple processes, getting rid of all the ones that don't matter, and just really streamlining.

Recently, we've brought in some of the mobile devices like the iPhone and some of those types of applications. In the past, a large number of our customers have always been using the .com form. Now, we're finding more and more users are going towards the mobile devices.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

We wanted to make sure that a lot of the applications lifecycle testing we had done with the .com could also be used with the mobile. We were able to take automation and a lot of the test cases and type things we had used with .com and use it with mobile.

We did write automation associated with mobile and were also able to bring that back into Quality Center, running that via Quick Test Pro. Even though mobile was a newer area for us, we were able to get the speed to market up on that as soon as possible.

Also, we were able to leverage that and use some of those automated scripts. We run those on a daily basis against our production mobile environment. If something is wrong with that, we know early in the morning. We run these scripts early in the morning before we come in, and we can know right away if something is there.

They can go in and determine what new requirements they need to make and what enhancements they want. It's really helpful.

So we were able to take the lifecycle information and the wins that we have got from the .com, and bring that into our mobile apps, and it's really helped us a lot. Our speed to market has significantly improved with that.

Bell: Another case would be our new homepage. We're sitting here at the end of 2010. About two months ago, we released a new, more streamlined homepage, a lot more innovative. A lot of people looked at that. We hid the logo during usability testing, and people were surprised to find out it was an airline website. They thought of us as one of the cool guys out there in the travel world.

We're getting much better in this area. By using all the feedback that we get from the customers, importing information in the Quality Center, tracking everything that we have in there, we were able to look at what we needed to make changes to. Once we released this, it was something that the customers were wanting, so it got a lot of good response.

... One of the things that’s really important to us is that we work with multiple vendors in multiple locations and with multiple time zones. It's important to make sure that all of them are using the same processes and that we're all using the overall tools. We use quality center personally to help organize a lot of the requirements and things like that in our testing efforts.

It's important that all of our vendors, whether it's in-house or people outside, are giving us the same processes and that we are able to leverage any of our automation or any of our business process testing or any of those tools, and that we can actually deliver high quality software quickly, can reduce our turnaround time, make sure that we're giving customers their best experience, and that we are getting our time to market in a timely manner.

Moses: It's truly huge. I mean if you look at Delta.com, it's the main revenue driver for the entire company. So it's our face to the world, and streamlining that process where people are making it better and making the customer experience better is our number one goal. We want to really give our customers what they want and make it easy for them, because we have a wide range of customers.

We have pleasure customers who travel with their families once or may be twice a year, sometimes even less, and then we have people who travel with us every week. So we have two very different types of audiences and we have to cater to both. We have to make it fast and enjoyable and we have to allow them to dream a little bit and be inspired by where they want to go.

It's one of the biggest things that we have on our plate with mobile. Mobile is the future. Everyone is going toward mobile devices and portable devices. You're seeing more and more iPhones, iPads, and Android devices out there in the world, especially when you walk through the airport. We don't like that it happens, but sometimes things are out of our control like weather. And, we are always safe, so these things impact our schedule.

Core lifecycle

Hipps: In the book, when we talk about the core lifecycle, historically the SDLC -- we just call it the core lifecycle, so as not to get lost in alphabet soup. Within that we see traits among world-class organizations. There tend to be four traits that these world class organizations have mastered, and we list these traits as being change ready. They have a high degree of predictability, high degree of repeatability, and certainly their output is of high quality.

So those four: change readiness, predictability, repeatability and quality, tend to be abstracting some traits that we see across these great orgs. Those tend to be the key ones that really they are very effective at. David and John have talked about that we have got data points in each one of those, in some of the examples they have given.

A lot of this change readiness to a large degrees is formed by the point that we made in the beginning in the podcast, which is that fundamentally everything that business wants to do is going to have some applications or set of applications behind it. There is going to be a dependency there.

The business is only as nimble as its applications are. That puts applications teams in a position where they are not holding the business off at arms length, and saying, "No, no, no, no, no, I can't do that. No, that will take months." That rigidity may be historically where we came from, when we had fewer applications. They changed less. They were much bigger, more monolithic, and brittle. That is not the world we live in today.

Today, change is the expectation. David and John have been talking about this code being lead revenue generator and Delta.com being the lead source of revenue on the Delta side. It's a great example. Clearly, anything the business wants to do to advance its market presence is going to come through that application.

You’ve got to have that one version of the truth. I would highly recommend getting that, the central tool that everyone can use and that you can put everything in.

The fact that they have leveraged automation and asset reuse and taken the time to build requirements traceability are all tick marks you put against organizations that have configured themselves to be change ready. That means they have stripped out as much latency as possible, the time it takes to do impact analysis.

They can see pretty quickly what all the dependencies are as a new change comes across. That’s just speaking of the assessment. There is, of course, the execution, which depends on automation, asset reuse, and all the things they talked about. We probably covered four of those, but certainly the change readiness does stand out.

Moses: You have to have that one version of the truth. I would highly recommend getting that, the central tool that everyone can use and that you can put everything in.

Second, it’s about mindset and alignment to your goals. You have to have alignment to the customer. You still have to have department goals, but they should be aligned to what the customer needs.

Contradiction in goals

A lot of times, you see a contradiction in goals between the business group and an IT group. Delivering what the IT group wants to do may not exactly get what the business wants. And if the business was focused on the customer and the IT groups are focused on how many projects they can get out, but doesn’t really matter what projects they are, then there's an issue.

So, you have to really align very closely between business and IT, so much so that if you even have something that is a huge impact to your company, you may want to wrap a special forces team or integrity team around that, and have that group be one. Business and IT all in one group -- that way you completely eliminate the us-versus-them mentality. If you can’t do that, definitely make sure that you're aligned to the customer.

Bell: One thing to add to that is that, at first, it can be a little scary moving things in, like moving all your requirements into one area and getting all the test cases and things and even looking at automation.

Sometimes, you have to take a half step back in order to take a full step forward. With us, even as we were moving things and centralizing it, there could be a little pain point in doing that, but that pain point will more than payoff in the long run. A lot of the people who are holding on to the old methodologies and ways of doing business, are thinking, "We're going to have to take a step back to do this."

You're going to get that money back, plus your time, so quickly that you will be shocked.

Whatever step you take in that direction and whatever pain point you take as you move forward, once you start getting the automations in place, once you get these tools in place, you’ll see that you can start moving faster and faster that any initial pain point you took. You're going to exponentially get that money back, plus your time, so quickly that you will be shocked.

Just look at the changing world that we live in. With Delta.com now, we live here in Atlanta. If you go over to the airport, you realize that our business is not just flying customers within the United States in English. We now have kiosks in six different languages, and you meet people from all over the world that are now using our products and our websites in everything from simple Chinese to French.

It’s important that we realize the global nature of what we are doing, and that our methodology and our IT departments have to align ourselves, so that we can move this quickly. Without the automation and without the centralized tools and things we would never be able to put out as much work as we currently do.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

You may also be interested in:

• New Book Explores Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle to Accelerate Delivery of Business Applications
  
  
• Delta Air Lines improves customer self-service apps quickly using automated quality assurance tools strategically
  
  
• HP Shows Benefits from Successful Application Consolidation With Own Massive Global Supply Chain Project