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

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Application Development and Lifecycle Management: The Impact of
Agile Practices on People, Processes, and Tools
Published on June 2009

Report Summary

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.
- Butler Group's 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, in Butler Group's opinion, 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 published by Butler Group 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 Butler Group's Technology Evaluation and Comparison
Reports).
The areas that are currently receiving the greatest activity in application development are:

Application Development and Lifecycle Management: The Impact of Agile Practices on People, Processes, and Tools Page 1/8


- Agile development and Agile project management.
- ALM.
- Testing and test management.
- Enterprise Web 2.0.

The application development subjects that are on the horizon, and which Butler Group predicts will take
centre ground, 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.

Business Issues
Ultimately, software applications are built to satisfy the needs of the business, and the subject of the clash of two different cultures '
the IT department and the rest of the business ' has been discussed often, possibly to exhaustion. Some intractable problems
become 'solved' through irrelevance because the ground has moved, and it can be said that whereas in the early days of computing
the computer department in a business was a quite distinct function, a place where data was sent to be processed and returned with
some useful statistics or reports, today there are businesses whose sole basis for existence relies on the IT function. Examples vary
from obvious ones such as online banks and Web 2.0 companies, to less obvious virtual companies that operate solely due to the
existence of the Internet and products with embedded software where the software component has grown exponentially. The net
result of this shift towards greater reliance on IT is that the business has to take a greater interest in its IT function to succeed in the
market, especially if the IT people are not delivering.

Butler Group has talked about the software crisis: the bad track record of large software projects that overrun budget, deliver late
(often by 100%), have quality problems, and so forth. A real-world example illustrates how businesses are tackling this problem
(names are omitted for confidentiality reasons): an IT company arose from being a small operation to having a billion dollar turnover in
a short period. This company used to release its key platform application on an annual basis, but as a result of this rapid growth its
current releases were taking 18 months and longer. The CEO gave the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) the highest priority directive
to solve the problem. The CTO decided that all the company's developers would switch to Scrum, the most popular Agile
methodology, in big-bang fashion. The switchover was a success and delivery was back to a 12-month cycle. BT is another example
where in this instance the CEO directed the company to adopt Agile, and an incremental adoption plan is in progress.Butler Group is
finding that Agile methodology adoption is a competitive differentiator for companies, and that this works best when there is a
champion at the highest level. Alternately, the concept of reducing waste is a message that many businesses understand and this is
central to Lean Development, which takes many ideas from the lean movement and Total Quality Management, and combines them
into an Agile methodology. Lean Development is found to be more comprehensible to businesses than some of the more
developer-oriented Agile practices.

Businesses also want greater real-time insight into software project progress, and the new generation of BI solutions integrated into
ALM suites provide this capability. Rather than reacting post-event, senior managers can act to avert problems escalating into
software crisis dimensions. In particular, visibility
into quality control and test performance of the work in progress is necessary. When schedules become pressured, testing is the area
that is traditionally cut by Project Managers. Therefore senior business managers must keep track of testing and quality ' getting this



wrong incurs long-term damage to the organisation in the marketplace. Agile methodologies are liked by business executives
because they make
testing an integral part of the development lifecycle, not the last activity before
shipping.

Enterprise Web 2.0 represents a puzzle to many company executives: they see staggeringly successful businesses emerge, based
on the Internet and the set of concepts and technologies behind Web 2.0, but do not see how this is relevant for them, or how they
can emulate that success. This is likely to change as Web 2.0 culture permeates the workforce, that were raised in the Internet age,
and use of the Web grows. Cloud Computing will accelerate that process, as various entrants trial new business models for earning
revenue by offering utility-like computing services. Addressing security concerns is paramount though and will act as the brake
whenever any mission-critical applications are considered. Expendable, low-risk business activity will find its way to the Cloud today.
It will probably take the Internet mark 2 (there are various initiatives for upgrading the Internet, increasing bandwidth and improving
security at nodes being prime motivations), for Cloud Computing to become truly ubiquitous.

Technology Issues
The ALM suite represents the best investment to support developers and management. However, its takeup
has tended to be at the large enterprise level, with many smaller organisations relying on point solutions. This has changed in the last
few years with the increasing adoption of Agile methodologies and the need to support the greater discipline and process required in
these practices. The waterfall process is relatively straightforward, with simple stage-gates and linear workflow, whereas an Agile
methodology like Scrum has iterations (daily Scrums) within iterations (Sprints, Spikes, and Retrospectives) within iterations (the
release plan). In order to support complex projects and distributed team members there is a need for tooling that allows Agile work
items, called 'stories' or 'features', to be easily moved around the workflow. Developer testing is a core activity in Agile, so rigging-up
automated, continuous testing is necessary. Real-time reports with charts for velocity and burndown need to be easily accessed and
displayed to all team members. The project managers need the electronic equivalent of a white board to easily manage an Agile
project and perform the various activities in the process. For example, at the iteration end a retrospective is held that requires all
stakeholders to attend and the product owner to re-prioritise stories. This needs to be easily performed and tracked. A new generation
of ALM solutions have appeared on the market to support these activities '
discussed in Section 2.3 of this Report.Butler Group's ALM architecture, our state-of-the-art view of ALM given in Section 3.1, makes
a number of distinctions: it separates out core ALM activity, cross-cutting the lifecycle segments, from plug-in ALM tools via a Service
Oriented Architecture (SOA) integration layer, and from external development tools like Integrated Development Environments, test
tools, and third-party ALM tools via an interoperability layer. The core layer comprises: a workflow engine and common repository as
essential; Software Change and Configuration Management (SCCM); reporting (and ideally BI analytics capability); process and
methodology support through Web-based guides and wikis (authoring and publishing tools, two-way access for users to read and
change content), and all accessible from the ALM tools at any point in the workflow; collaboration support; software estimation (which
is underrepresented in ALM but should be integral); and issue and defect management (commonly found in operations but good
practice for use in development).

Butler Group also believes that support for modelling (MDD or MDA) should be an integral part of core ALM. In reality, as mentioned
in the introduction to this Section, there have been setbacks in the vendor modelling community. Certainly the developer community
appears divided between those that support modelling and those that do not, with many in the Agile community shunning the activity.
The fact remains that for complex projects modelling is a necessity ' the telecom, automotive, and aerospace industries are examples
where modelling is successfully used. The limited take-up of MDA by customers has more to do with the lack of a reference system
and the slow evolution of an action/behaviour language: this is a programming language that is used to describe the business or
application logic. The most successful modelling tools on the market combine visual models with an action language for the detailed
work. A big mistake in the early days of MDA was to assume that everything should be done with the Unified Modeling Language ' the
truth is that it is not flexible enough and it is also a boring activity. Programming is successful because it is versatile and also fun. The
trick is to combine visual models with an action language.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) continue to feed into modern, Web-based applications, and are now a
standard fixture. The name will probably fade away as the technology continues to become the default '



the application development tools will make non-rich Web components and widgets obsolete. The shift is
towards what is being built and this is where business-oriented Web 2.0, or Enterprise Web 2.0 (the
terminology preferred in this Report), takes centre stage.

Market Issues
Integration is one of the thorniest questions in ALM today. The first initiative to create an open ALM
framework based on the Eclipse platform failed due to lack of widespread vendor support (known as
Application Lifecycle Framework, the project's lead vendor, Serena Software, shut it down in 2008).
Meanwhile IBM, the originator of Eclipse, created a new server-side ALM platform named Jazz.net. Jazz is designed to be open and a
number of application development tool providers are building plug-ins for it, but the platform is being used for integrating a host of
IBM Rational products, legacy and new generation, and in perfect timing, ALM products from the Telelogic acquisition that concluded
in 2008.
The other ALM leaders alongside IBM ' Borland and Microsoft ' are also making integration a key forward strategy. Borland is building
an integration layer (Borland Open ALM Framework or BOAF) and is planning on providing connectors for two third-party leading
products in each ALM segment (requirements, change and configuration, etc.). It is also moving its legacy solution to this integration
layer, with the new-generation Borland Management Solution already built on BOAF.Microsoft also has an ALM platform in Visual
Studio Team System (VSTS), with an ecosystem of vendors providing products that plug-into the platform. However, the upcoming
release ' VSTS 2010 ' will take Microsoft to the ranks of end-to-end ALM vendors, competing directly with IBM and Borland at the top.
VSTS is a natural candidate for Microsoft developers building .NET solutions, its support for other languages and operating systems
is limited though.

The Butler Group ALM system architecture (see Section 3.1) has SCCM as a core ALM tool, but a number of ALM suite vendors have
opted out from competing in a segment of the market they view as mature and saturated. Vendors like Compuware, HP, and Rally
Software will need to provide deep and orchestrated native integration to a range of SCCM products in order to achieve what Butler
Group considers to be essential ALM functionality. They all support the popular open source Subversion SCCM product. Compuware
and HP are long-time ALM providers, spanning mainframe and distributed systems, and also offer strong Application Performance
Management solutions. HP Software also incorporates what was the Mercury product line and has deep capability in testing tools.
Rally Software is one of a new breed of ALM solution providers with an Agile development focus and a hosted solution business
model (although Rally Software will consider on-premises provision). The appearance of these new ALM vendors, Polarion Software
and TechExcel are further examples that appear for the first time in this Report, indicates that there is a great opportunity in the
market to address customer needs. In its early years ALM had a mainly large enterprise appeal, so the market is wide open for
expansion. Finally, MKS and Serena Software continue to mature and build on their ALM solutions, are a short distance from the
leading group, and can offer their unique takes on the ALM market. For MKS it is all about organic growth and tight integration, each
time Butler Group visits MKS it has added another segment to its native ALM capability. Serena Software has also made progress
with support for business mashups and Agile development as core
activities. Butler Group views the ALM solution market as being in a revitalised state, with Agile and Software-as-a-Service creating
new opportunities that should see ALM adoption reach further into the developer community. Despite the world economic recession at
the time of writing this Report, investment in an ALM approach is a sound course of action to take that will lower development costs in
the long run, and also help deliver better software products.

Late Breaking News
As this Report went to publication the news broke that Micro Focus International (a UK company) is to
acquire Borland in a cash deal described as a definitive agreement. Furthermore it was also announced that Micro Focus is to acquire
assets from Compuware's Quality Solutions portfolio, covering Application Testing and Automated Software Quality products. The
move, if concluded successfully, will catapult Micro Focus into the front rank of the ALM market. This acquisition follows the recent
acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, with particular interest to developers concerned with the future of Java. It is Butler Group's
opinion that Oracle will be a good guardian of Java.
This Report reveals:
- The impact of Agile methodologies in application development.
- How a new generation of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) systems support team collaboration.



- A side-by-side feature comparison of ALM products.
- What Business Intelligence for application development canoffer.
- How new process and methodology support in ALM solutionsimproves development.
- The latest advances in Agile Project Management and Test Management.
- Butler Group's market analysis of the leading ALM vendors.

Table of Content

Contents ' June 2009

Section 1: Management Summary 9
1.1 Management Summary 11
Section 2: Application Development and Lifecycle Management Today 17
2.1 Report Introduction and Objectives 19
2.2 Application Development Trends 21
2.3 Advances in Processes and Methodologies 26
2.4 The People Aspects of ALM 30
2.5 Application Development in Emerging Environments 34
Section 3: The Butler Group ALM Evaluation Model 39
3.1 The Butler Group Application Lifecycle Management System Architecture 41
3.2 The ALM Solution Features Matrix 46
Section 4: Agile Development and Project Management 57
4.1 Understanding Agile Development 59
4.2 Agile Software Change and Configuration Management 63
4.3 Advances in Project Management 66
Section 5: Testing and Test Management 73
5.1 New Tools in the Market 75
5.2 Test Driven Development 78
5.3 Advances in Test Management 81
Section 6: Market Analysis 85
6.1 Butler Group Application Development and Lifecycle Management Features Matrix 87
6.2 The Application Development and Lifecycle Management Decision Matrix 113
6.3 Vendor Analysis 119
Section 7: Technology Audits 145
Aldon ' Aldon ALM Solution 147
Borland ' Borland ALM Portfolio 157
Compuware Corporation ' Compuware ALM Suite 167
HP ' HP ALM Solution Set 177
IBM Rational ' IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform 187
Microsoft ' Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2010 197
MKS ' MKS Integrity 2009 205
Polarion Software ' Polarion ALM Enterprise 3.2 215
Rally Software ' Rally Enterprise ALM Platform 225
Serena Software ' Serena ALM Suite 235
TechExcel ' TechExcel DevSuite 245
Section 8: Vendor Profiles 255
AccuRev 257
Adobe 258



Atlassian 259
CA 260
CollabNet 262
Coverity 264
edge IPK 265
Electric Cloud 266
Exoftware 267
Kovair 268
Oracle 269
OutSystems 271
Perforce Software 271
Section 8: Vendor Profiles (Continued)
RADTAC 272
Salesforce.com 273
Sapient 275
ThoughtWorks 276
TotalView 278
UPCO 279
VersionOne 280
Zend 281
Section 9: Glossary 283



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