Leveraging Life-Cycle Management for Software and Business AdaptabilityLeveraging Life-Cycle Management for Software and Business Adaptability

W H I T E P A P E R

L e v e r a g i n g L i f e - C y c l e M a n a g e m e n t f o r S o f t w a r e a n d
B u s i n e s s A d a p t a b i l i t y
Sponsored by: Borland

Melinda-Carol Ballou

October 2006
I D C O P I N I O N

c
o
m
Global 2000 organizations must unite application life-cycle management and quality
.
i
dc.
across complex, distributed environments and be increasingly accountable to global
compliance and other pressures. Staff at all levels — from management to


www
development — are being driven to connect the software development life cycle from
project inception through high-quality deployments. The coordination of quality
.
4015
through requirements, testing, change management, modeling, and portfolio
935
prioritization impacts successful implementations, business, and IT productivity, and
.
508.
savvy IT organizations are focusing avidly on this area. This coordination is

F
particularly important in the context of pressures on Global 2000 corporations,
including offshoring and outsourcing, regulatory compliance and emerging new
.
8200
development paradigms with service oriented architecture (SOA), software as a
872
service (SaaS), and open source. The purpose of this white paper is to lay out the
.
508.
role that life-cycle management and development play to enable effective and


P
adaptive business/IT collaboration. It also discusses the overall impact on corporate
A
S
U
and IT success of requirements, change management, modeling, testing, and best-
practice life-cycle approaches.

01701
A
,

M
I N T H I S W H I T E P A P E R
i
ngham
This white paper considers the interaction between requirements and other life-cycle
phases, with an emphasis on testing, change and code management, and effective

Fram
processes to enable more adaptive approaches to software development and
t
r
eet
changing competitive environments.
peen S
:

5 S
S I T U A T I O N O V E R V I E W : M A R K E T T R E N D S
e
rs
A N D E V O L U T I O N
Business users, analysts, and IT staff struggle to communicate effectively about
business requirements. As a result of the cultural divide across groups and ineffective

Headquart
common communication vehicles, IT staff all too often create projects with little
obal
Gl
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.

T h e T o p 5 T r e n d s D r i v i n g S o f t w a r e L i f e - C y c l e
Q u a l i t y I m p r o v e m e n t
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.
2 #203708 ©2006
IDC

---

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.

P u r s u i n g E f f e c t i v e R e q u i r e m e n t s M a n a g e m e n t
A c r o s s t h e Q u a l i t y L i f e C y c l e f o r T e s t i n g a n d
C h a n g e M a n a g e m e n t
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. Establishing an approach for performance testing also sets the course for
development and deployment. As the project progresses, change management
decisions should be prioritized based on key business imperatives (e.g., effective,
current, relevant requirements). In turn, once made, those changes need to be tested
to ensure that they don't break the application and create defects and also that they
are in line with key functionality determined by melding requirements with functional
tests. This triumvirate of life-cycle processes should be closely married and integrated
for project success.
The benefits are clear for agile iterative approaches to development that include
shorter cycle times, the ability to more quickly respond to key business needs
(because the business must prioritize and the delivery times are faster), and
requirements that are more limited, delineated, and clear cut. IDC sees the strong
emergence of agile approaches in a variety of contexts (e.g., Web development and
SOA). Yet as organizations pursue agile development approaches, the possibilities
for failure as a result of poor requirements, testing, and change management
increase. Stitching these smaller projects together and being responsive to changing,
iterative requirements demand both effective test and change management as part of
the quality life-cycle process. Again, criteria for changes and prioritization of testing
resources must be tied to requirements that have the greatest business impact.
Pulling together these aspects of the life cycle within automated tool suites is a
technology requirement to address the complex "perfect storm" of emerging
development environments described earlier. These tools must be accompanied by
effective process and organizational change to support a culture for life-cycle quality
management that includes the elements of requirements, test and change
management, and build automation and modeling.
©2006 IDC
#203708
3

---

T e c h n o l o g y R e q u i r e m e n t s a n d C r i t e r i a :
L a y i n g O u t a n A p p r o a c h
Criteria for successful and agile requirements and quality management within the
enterprise include the links between key business stakeholders and IT development
staff. In determining core functional requirements for quality management,
organizations might find it helpful to ask a series of questions that target tools
functionality, process, and organizational evolution. How mature is the organization
from a life-cycle process and organizational perspective, and where are the greatest
pain points? How well integrated are vendors' requirements tools with testing? How
intuitive and accessible are the requirements tools for mere mortals (e.g., business
personnel and staff unfamiliar with arcane user interfaces or complex modeling
paradigms)? Do links exist between requirements, modeling and change
management, and testing with change management? Can the quality life cycle,
including testing and other resources, be effectively prioritized by leveraging
requirements? What impact analysis is available with regard to existing systems,
defect tracking, and metrics to obtain performance optimization? What are key
process and organizational issues, and how are they related to and integrated with
technology solutions? How do business users struggle with disparate approaches and
inadequate coordination with IT? What are key benefits of a different requirements
management approach that coordinates throughout the life cycle? What are the risks
and costs of refusing to incorporate a quality life-cycle approach? These questions
and others can serve as a starting point for making the transition to coordinated life-
cycle approaches.
From an IDC perspective, functionality across the quality life cycle includes intuitive
requirements development and gathering capabilities to pull in key business
information, which, in turn, will feed requirements management and modeling tools,
integration between requirements and test management tools to facilitate creation of
appropriate test scripts for functional tests, current and relevant information with
regard to performance and deployment needs, and bidirectional data feeds to garner
information with regard to resource capabilities to help feed metrics and decisions
about appropriate staff allocations on comparable future projects. In addition, the
ability to coordinate requirements with testing facilitates creation of more effective,
targeted requirements. Integration with change management and defect tracking and
analysis tools helps facilitate prioritization of change requests and metrics to support
key business benefits and improved resource allocation. Build management and code
analysis enable additional insight and metrics for a quality development process and
better code management. All of these factors potentially cut costs, but even more
importantly, they enable business responsiveness and adaptability to highly
competitive global markets.

4 #203708 ©2006
IDC

---

A c q u i s i t i o n s a n d M e r g e r s : T a r g e t i n g
C o o r d i n a t e d S o l u t i o n s
It is significant that a series of vendors across the life-cycle arena have purchased and/or
closely integrated requirements, change management, and, where possible, testing tools
and processes over the past several years. The acquisition of requirements tools by SCM
vendors over the course of the past two to three years underscores the growing market
trend toward confluence in those areas (e.g., IBM Rational, Borland/Starbase/Caliber,
Telelogic/DOORS/Continuus, and Serena/RTM/Apptero). Concurrently, acquisitions and
attempts to more closely ally testing with both requirements and SCM underscore growing
vendor commitment in this area (Compuware/SteelTrace, and Borland/Segue). The push
toward pulling in build management and code analysis is exemplified in other recent M&A
activity (IBM/BuildForge, BMC/Identify, and Borland/Gauntlet). Another obvious area of
confluence is IT portfolio management to enable better prioritization for IT projects and
programs and coordination with the overall IT portfolio (ten acquisitions over three years,
four within the past year, most recently HP/Mercury). At their best and at a granular level,
effective requirements can help to inform and drive decisions with regard to testing,
change, and even portfolio management by providing business context and traceability
back to key business benefits.
The increase in depth and breadth across application development life-cycle
management products does not, however, address the core areas of process and
organizational change that are necessary prerequisites to successful, quality life-cycle
implementations.
The biggest barrier to adoption for these products is the human barrier. Companies
must put in place effective process and workflow strategies, among others, to enable
effective and consistent communication between business and IT. They must also
establish an organizational framework with sufficient executive management clout to
sustain the initiative and support success. These integrated approaches can facilitate
leverage of information from the combined toolsets. Coordination with effective
methodology and organizational approaches can enable the cultural transition to those
shifts in process.
This white paper considers Borland's approach to these Global 2000 challenges.

B o r l a n d P o i n t s o f D i f f e r e n t i a t i o n a n d A p p r o a c h
t o t h e L i f e - C y c l e M a n a g e m e n t P r o b l e m
Borland's push into the life-cycle arena beyond development began with its
Starbase/CaliberRM acquisition three years ago, augmenting the existing Borland
modeling and development tools with requirements (CaliberRM) and software change
and configuration management capabilities (StarTeam). In the past year and a half,
Borland acquisitions have focused on process and methodology (with TeraQuest
consulting staff and content), basic portfolio management capabilities (with Legadero),
and most recently, quality control and testing (with Segue). As Borland divests of its
development environments to squarely target application life-cycle management across
areas, a push toward coordination of requirements with a quality life-cycle approach has
been a main focus. It incorporates Borland's past focus on and experience with
development and is the primary point of departure for the company.
©2006 IDC
#203708
5

---

With CaliberRM combined with the recently released DefineIT, Borland lays the
groundwork for combining more intuitive requirements gathering with back-end
management for auditability and traceability. Integration between requirements and
the Together modeling suite (shipping now) positions Borland to create models that
are aligned with requirement demands by users. This release of Together also
provides Eclipse integration and focus on SOA (addressing several of the trends
discussed earlier in this white paper). Based in part on its earlier close partnership
with Segue prior to acquiring the company in 2Q06, Borland is launching integration
between its requirements tools and the Segue testing and test management products.
In conjunction with StarTeam for change and configuration management integration
(shipping now) and Gauntlet's code and build analysis and management capabilities
(integration due to ship in 4Q06), this combined approach for quality life cycle enables
coordination across key life-cycle phases. These product capabilities include the
potential for closer business alignment for software initiatives, improved quality and
prioritization of software changes, and comprehensive management of development
in the context of existing infrastructure. Cost savings could accrue with regard to
software success due to greater relevance, coordination of testing with core
requirements and performance needs, greater rigor, better prioritization and control
for change management, and more effective defect management in coordination with
testing. These capabilities also lay the stage for greater IT and business
responsiveness to global markets in the context of a comprehensive, quality life-cycle
approach. Although Borland is divesting its IDE business, its prior historical focus on
development provides a strong context for software project deployment as it seeks to
shift its business to target the overall software development life cycle.
Yet the complexity of this approach has its challenges. Borland is up against the
largest vendors in the software market as it targets a mature, integrated life-cycle
management arena (e.g., Microsoft, IBM, CA, Compuware, HP/Mercury). In its efforts
to pursue this space, Borland needs to emphasize its agnosticism with regard to
IDEs, platforms and technologies and the productivity and ease of use of many of the
tools in its portfolio. Also, Borland's tools offerings can leverage capabilities from a
CMMI process and organizational consulting perspective resulting from its TeraQuest
acquisition, which is differentiating.
C H A L L E N G E S A N D O P P O R T U N I T I E S
Combining the full breadth of solutions that have been separately acquired is
demanding, both for users and for Borland. Bidirectional integration across products
must work seamlessly. Key to this strategy is the underlying process approach and
shift enabled by Borland's consulting arm. As users implement an increasingly
integrated quality life-cycle approach with automated tools, they must also incorporate
effective process and organizational change to help disparate parts of the
organization better coordinate with one another. Borland is already engaged in
establishing closer integration across products (the majority of which were acquired
more than three years ago).
6 #203708 ©2006
IDC

---

In addition, it is vital to retain integration with non-Borland tools and partners who now
are "co-opetitive" in the testing arena (such as HP/Mercury and Compuware) and
elsewhere, as Borland has been able to do previously to some extent (in the
requirements, SCM, and modeling arenas).
Borland will increasingly be up against both niche players and behemoth vendors and
must execute nimbly and adaptively in a highly crowded, consolidating and
challenging market. The opportunity for Borland resides in the multiple factors driving
user adoption and market growth presented earlier and the productivity and usability
of its chosen tool suite combined with strong process and organizational approaches.
S U M M A R Y
Overall, the five disruptive elements discussed in this white paper are pushing Global
2000 organizations toward more effective quality life-cycle management and
governance. Companies have no choice in these highly competitive environments,
dominated by regulatory compliance initiatives and complex sourcing. They must
adopt better coordinated, more rigorous approaches to requirements and quality
management or face the risk of failure and competitive loss.
Increasingly, IDC sees Global 2000 organizations beginning to address the
coordination between requirements and other life-cycle phases more effectively as a
result of industry and market pressures. These factors are combining to drive
organizations toward greater rigor and at the same time enable funding of these types
of initiatives (via compliance and the need to manage complex, distributed staffing).
Shifting existing practices and behavior to adopt coordinated approaches to
requirements, modeling, testing, and change management is key, however. For
success, it is vital that business and IT staff transition to coordinated practices and
organizational governance approaches as they adopt integrated life-cycle
management technologies. In this way, they will be better able to gain the adaptability
and cost benefits of a coherent, cohesive approach to application development and a
dynamic, responsive IT/business relationship for competitive advantage in today's
global markets.



C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e
External Publication of IDC Information and Data — Any IDC information that is to be
used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written
approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the
proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to
deny approval of external usage for any reason.
Copyright 2006 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden.
©2006 IDC
#203708
7

---