Most companies have spent millions on software development processes that are supposed to help solve many of the problems stated above. However, just putting them into a binder and distributing them isn't the answer. What is needed is an application that can automate the life cycle - enforcing the processes, collecting the metrics to see if they're successful, and enhancing communication between the teams.

This article defines the key criteria to look for when assessing a new solution for automation of the software development life cycle. The four issues that are most critical to successfully bringing applications to release are:

1. Assisting development organizations with defining and executing a consistent life cycle process
2. Giving team members quick and easy access to all life cycle information
3. Providing real-time visibility into the applications portfolio, to make investments decisions and determine the status of all programs
4. Bringing the extended development team, including partners and business users, into close communication with the core development team

An effective automation solution must help the organization accomplish its objectives while minimizing the impact on the development team members. MS2 Accelerate is being used by application development organizations to help them address these challenges and deliver better applications faster.

Application Development Practices
It's a widely accepted fact that accessing information and the applications that manage it is strategic to an organization's ability to maintain its competitiveness in the marketplace. Managing a portfolio of applications through the development life cycle and delivering the right applications at the right time are key to driving a company's revenue and growing its market share. Organizations that can effectively plan and execute their application delivery strategy and deliver the right applications faster and cost effectively have a marked advantage in today's competitive business environment. Yet, in spite of its importance, application development management remains a very complex endeavor with limited tools and technologies to manage it.

In a recent survey of 140 high-technology executives, 99% agreed that it is hard or very hard to repeatedly and predictably deliver applications on time. The challenges of effective application life cycle management are exemplified by the following:

Fewer than 5% of all application development programs have successfully identified the complete set of customer requirements before beginning application design.

Figure 3 illustrates this point. The earlier in the life cycle you can identify problems and propose a solution, the easier it is to correct them. As simple as this may seem, most organizations fail in this, many times because the team lacks visibility into the overall solutions.

Complex Challenges Facing Application Development
The application development life cycle has evolved from the traditional waterfall process into a highly flexible one requiring multiple decision check points and input from not only the engineering teams, but often multiple business teams, often located on separate continents. These projects are usually under severe time constraints, requiring teams to execute quickly on a common objective. Even though most development activities are interdependent, the time-compressed environments that software projects exist in dictate that they must occur in parallel in order to meet the requirement window. The complexity of applications being developed and the need to leverage core competencies and advances in software technology, such as Web services and component architectures, requires that many of these projects be conducted in conjunction with joint-development partners. As the number of applications under development and the number of partners involved in the process increase, however, the resulting complexity is overwhelming.

Change Is Constant
The only constant in software development projects is change. Managing the application development life cycle would be difficult even if all requirements were known up front and never changed during the development process. But the reality of today's competitive business environment guarantees that there will often be significant changes in customer requirements and available technologies, not to mention employee turnover on the team. The ability to anticipate and effectively respond to changes in the market separates the winners from the losers.

Time to Market Is Critical
As the competitive environment intensifies, the time between new application releases continues to shrink. The speed at which technology changes also affects how quickly applications must be delivered. The window of opportunity between an application's feasibility and its ultimate obsolescence is narrowing. And because being late could be disastrous, extreme pressure is placed on application development teams to move quickly. To survive, organizations absolutely must develop the right application and deliver it at the right time.

Business Users Are More Sophisticated
With the development of Java applications, object-oriented programming, and browser-based applications, business users demand an application that can be easily adapted to their specific needs. Therefore, the creation of cross-functional business teams and the ability for them to communicate is critical to getting business validation of the application plan before the development process begins, as is continuously monitoring business feedback throughout the development process.

Resources Are Scarce
The most valuable resources in an organization are always scarce. Finding, training, and retaining application team members with highly specialized skill sets are continual challenges. It's often difficult to be sure that the most strategic development programs have been allocated sufficient resources for success. The allocation of these scarce resources is at the core of an effective application portfolio investment strategy.

Assessing an Organization's Current Approach
Executive managers can enlighten themselves by asking the following questions about their own application organization and development process:

If you answered no to some of these questions, you're not alone. Application development organizations have implemented many different tools to manage some of these complexities. Spreadsheets, program management software, source-control systems, and even home-built Web sites are being used in an attempt to assess a company's ability to design and build the right new applications. While these tools are all useful, they often create islands of information that quickly become out-of-date or obsolete, making it difficult for the team to execute on an integrated application strategy. If you can automate the processes and create process improvement, the payback is enormous. (see Figure 4)

The Need for a Solution
An automated solution is required to provide the information application development organizations need to answer these questions confidently. It's important to consider what capabilities and features are needed in such a solution. A sound set of assessment criteria will ensure the best selection.

Criteria for Automating the Application Life Cycle The increasing challenge of defining and developing winning applications on time has led to the need for an application to automate the application development life cycle. A viable Product Life Cycle Automation (PLA) solution must meet the criteria explained below.

A Successful, Repeatable Application Life Cycle Process An application organization typically has an application development life cycle that it would like to follow for every program. The life cycle process is often long, detailed, difficult to execute, and even harder to repeat every time across multiple programs. Even when the entire process is fully documented, the plans may remain in a binder on someone's desk, where they're often forgotten or skipped. Many of the improvements or lessons learned never get repeated because there isn't consistent use of the defined process. A study of a dozen companies found that a viable solution for automating the application development life cycle must meet the following criteria:

Application development organizations spent less time on administrative activities and more time focused on application development. The result: business units that embraced this approach reduced their average development times by 30-50%.

The first step toward ensuring a consistent and effective new application life cycle is to create a process. A PLA solution must allow the application development organization to capture its best practices in the form of processes and templates. Ideally, it should provide out-of-the-box best practices for organizations that haven't had time to create them. These processes and templates should be embedded into the work environment and the tools that team members use, thus avoiding their binder problem. Each new program should be able to leverage these best practices without requiring team members to dig up documentation on the process. Finally, successful execution of the process means that every individual on the team knows his or her role in pursuing the goal: What deliverables am I responsible for? When do I create them? Who must review and approve them?

Single Source for All Application Life Cycle Information
The complexity of development programs and the interdependencies of each team member's work require a common framework for interaction. This interaction, however, can consume an inordinate amount of time and energy.

A recent study found that engineering resources, on average, spend 70-75% of their time attending meetings, correcting mistakes, and traveling, leaving only 25-30% of their time for value-adding activities such as designing, developing, testing and solving problems.

Project managers often spend the majority of their time creating "executive dashboards" for weekly review meetings, in an attempt to give project visibility to executives. On large projects this may involve the consolidation of multiple-project plan information and numerous phone calls and e-mails. A pattern begins to emerge; by the time the project manager has finished the review materials, the cycle must begin again, never allowing the project manager to truly manage the project.

Application development organizations have tried the following alternatives to address this problem:

Shared Drives or Folders
Many organizations use shared drives or folders to allow team members to share documents on a given development program. Because the structure is generally ad hoc, however, most find that it is still cumbersome for team members to locate the right deliverables. Even when they can find deliverables, it's often unclear whether they have the latest version and whether it's a draft, a review copy, or the final approved version.

Source-Code Control System
Most software development organizations use a source-code control system to store deliverables related to a given program. While this provides structure and manages document versions, it often causes difficulty for many team members who don't have access to (or don't know how to use) these systems. Such systems also make it difficult to share information with extended development teams that include partners and business users.

Home-Built Web Sites
Some organizations hire individuals full-time to create and maintain a Web site for tracking development programs. This alternative provides team members with easy access to deliverables and status, but there is a significant cost associated with it. The owners of the Web site not only spend the time to create and maintain it, but often spend a great deal of additional time tracking down team members in order to get them to provide status and the latest versions of their deliverables for posting to the site. These resources could otherwise be used to help drive the application through the life cycle. The effectiveness of these Web sites depends upon the promptness of the Webmaster in posting team members' updated documents, data, and status reports.

An application development life cycle automation solution must provide a single source for all status and deliverables. That solution must be:

Thus, application team members will be able to spend their time developing applications, as opposed to creating and managing Web sites or searching for the right document.

To maximize expected return on investment, executives must have the information to clearly assess the strategic value of each program, its status, and its apparent risks. An application life cycle automation solution must provide a live view into the status and future plans for all development programs, allowing executives to quickly assess portfolio status. The solution must allow them to manage by exception and take action where appropriate to ensure that the most critical applications yielding the highest ROI are delivered on time and with customer-valued functionality. Too often, executive managers use a stale application roadmap presentation to make feature content or application release date commitments to business users. Since the last executive roadmap review, the application team may have moved the release date and added or deferred key features. Understanding the complete status of a development program is a difficult task. Collecting and reviewing status reports from each team member can be time-consuming and may not provide the key information necessary to determine whether a program is really on track. In a recent study of software development programs, researchers found that at least 7 of the 10 most common signs of application development failure were present before the design was created or a single line of code was written. Visibility into these leading indicators is critical to identifying potential problems and attempting to remedy them.

Globally Dispersed Application Teams
Application development teams are increasingly global. Resources, including employees, contractors, partners, and business users, are geographically dispersed and often have limited hours during the business day to communicate. All too often, critical information gets distributed to these different participants by request only. Moreover, the information delivered to different constituents may be inconsistent and can quickly become stale, limiting the ability to effectively collaborate on the program.

An effective PLA solution must effectively manage geographically dispersed constituents through a scalable and highly available architecture. It must allow collaboration among team members without the need for continual meetings.

Summary
In today's business environment, investment in technology, especially software development, is being led by ROI. Gone are the days of unlimited IS budgets. Executives need to understand where and how their software development budgets are being spent. The first step to understanding this is managing the process and managing the people. Neither can be accomplished effectively without some type of tool that ensures the process is being repeated, and that can provide a central location for the collection and storage of metrics around the process.