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The purpose of this white paper is to lay out the role that life-cycle management and development play to enable effective and adaptive business/IT collaboration. It also discusses the overall impact on corporate and IT success of requirements, change management, modeling, testing, and best-practice life-cycle approaches.
Business users, analysts, and IT staff struggle to communicate effectively about business requirements. As a result of the cultural divide across groups and ineffective common communication vehicles, IT staff all too often create projects with little relevance to key business needs. Even where communication and requirements capture are decent initially, business change and lack of a common language across groups still drive misunderstanding and poor iterative development approaches. In addition, poor coordination between requirements, modeling, testing, change, and IT portfolio management results in disconnects for quality control, irrelevant applications, and poor prioritization of IT resources for change requests and iterative development.
The disconnect between requirements and testing impacts user quality viscerally. Amorphous or outdated requirements lead to irrelevant functional tests, inadequate parameters for performance testing, and anemic service-level agreements (SLAs), among other problems.
The Top 5 Trends Driving Software Life-Cycle Quality Improvement
The overall impact of poor life-cycle quality coordination is particularly challenging in the context of increasingly complex development environments. We see five critical trends that are disrupting existing, ineffective approaches and enabling a push toward more consistent life-cycle approaches for software development. They are complex sourcing, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and other regulatory compliance initiatives (in the context of a global economy), the emergence of SOA approaches for development, open source adoption, and SaaS and "on-demand" models for licensing and deployment.
Distributed development of internal resources, offshoring and outsourcing, and the need for collaboration across groups that are separated geographically and culturally demand effective communication vehicles. Such vehicles include best-practice approaches to requirements gathering, testing, and change management, as well as automated technologies to enable more effective communication about content, modeling, business processes, and so forth.
In addition to complex sourcing, regulatory compliance initiatives mandate auditability and rigor with regard to project and program evolution, quality, and change management. Organizations with poor life-cycle management in core areas - including requirements, testing, and change management - run significant risks with regard to regulatory compliance requirements. The need for compliance runs the gambit from legislation such as SOX and Basel II to localized compliance initiatives for Global 2000 organizations managing their businesses worldwide. Thus, any company doing business globally must address this range of compliance issues.
Evolution toward a SOA approach for development by many organizations also demands effective requirements gathering and management. There is no point in investing in SOA development unless core business needs are represented and tested in the resulting services that are created. Challenges in the ability of Global 2000 organizations to effectively communicate business needs and processes result in failure and wasted investment in SOA initiatives.
Drivers for increased complexity that have also facilitated life-cycle adoption include open source (greater availability of "free" quality software for development and life-cycle management) and SaaS hosted and shared infrastructure models for licensing and tools deployment. While open source has seeded a broader, previously uninitiated market for life-cycle adoption, SaaS helps facilitate adoption of life-cycle products by decreasing barriers posed by implementation and internal support costs.
These factors create a "perfect storm" of complexity and disruption that increases both the drivers for life-cycle adoption of automated technology and enables software purchases and implementation through increased expenditures (e.g., regulatory compliance and complex sourcing). As a result, Global 2000 organizations are moving to adopt more effective approaches to requirements, modeling, testing, and change management. Coordination in this context enables a "quality life-cycle" approach across life-cycle phases.
Pursuing Effective Requirements Management Across the Quality Life Cycle for Testing and Change Management
Requirements and quality management are inextricably linked. If requirements pursued by IT in creating software are inaccurate, irrelevant, and/or outdated, projects fail. Effective testing demands functional tests that reflect key business demands and that lay out a framework for appropriate performance testing and optimization to meet user needs and SLAs. The creation of functional tests early and iteratively in the life cycle helps solidify requirements that might otherwise remain amorphous and nebulous.
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