Aarkstore Enterprise- Application Development and Lifecycle Management: The Impact of Agile Practice

Application Development and Lifecycle Management: The Impact of Agile Practices on People, Processes, and Tools

The options available for building software applications have never been so wide ranging as they are today. This is largely to do with the impact of the Web, with different solution models available depending on user needs, from infrastructure to end device considerations. The most recent trend of cloud computing is also opening new possibilities that are lowering the cost barrier, increasing access to high performance computing, and also lowering the skill barrier for non-programmer information workers, whether in SMEs or departments in large organisations, to build business applications.

KEY FINDINGS
- ALM systems have improved considerably from the first generation of products; the new generation is Web-based and strong on collaboration.
- Agile methodology adoption has entered mainstream development and is making developers and managers rethink how they carry out application development.
- Agile practices are having a major influence on the ALM solutions market; supporting Agile processes is a hot area.
- ALM system architecture identifies core lifecycle functions, including process support with workflow, integrated data repository, and reporting.
- Business Intelligence (BI) for application development has now become an ALM system fixture, offering advanced analytics applied to project statistics.
- Software estimation remains a niche activity but should, be a core lifecycle activity in ALM.
- Defect and Issue Management is another core activity that cross-cuts the application lifecycle and is supported well by leading ALM systems.
- ALM system users should have read-and-write features for process guides, allowing users to modify content, supporting collaboration and knowledge exchange.
- ALM systems that alter the functionality exposed depending on the process selected represent an advanced, state-of-the-art technology, not yet seen in the market.
- The rise in Software Systems Engineering reflects the increasing use of software

CATALYST
Application development continues to evolve with processes and methodologies receiving significant
attention through Agile practices, while on the tooling side a new generation of Application Lifecycle
Management (ALM) products are appearing with process and workflow support figuring largely.
June 2009

ANALYSIS
Introduction
Software application development is one of those subjects that never disappears but is always evolving. Since the last general survey Report on this subject – Application Lifecycle
Management (ALM), published in September 2005 – there has been a lot of activity in the ALM field. With our colleagues in Datamonitor we published an ALM Decision Matrix in 2007 that looked at the vendor ALM suite market, and we now repeat that exercise in this Report with all the leading vendors participating. (The Datamonitor Decision Matrix also replaces what used to be the Market Lifecycle Ratings in Technology Evaluation and Comparison Reports).
The areas that are currently receiving the greatest activity in application development are:
- Agile development and Agile project management.
- ALM.
- Testing and test management.
- Enterprise Web 2.0.

The application development subjects that are on the horizon, are:
- Development in the Cloud.
- Parallel programming (especially General Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units – or
GPGPU).
- Extension of ALM to overlap IT governance.
- RESTful Service Oriented Architecture. (REST is Representational State Transfer).

While what and how applications are being developed evolves, developers are still needed to programme the machines and create these applications. It had been considered that advanced modelling such as Model Driven Development (MDD) in the guise of software factories would at some point deliver on the next leap forward, a technological breakthrough such as a higher abstraction compiler that takes models rather than a high-level programming language to churn out the machine code. The Object Management Group’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) appeared to be moving in that direction. This did not transpire, and is not likely to in the immediate future. These themes are expanded upon below.


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