“A Good ALM Solution improves team productivity by providing only 'one version' of truth for everyone to work on” Shiv Sivaguru, HCL Technologies

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

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With tighter project deadlines and increased pricing pressures, how do you still deliver the same value or more to your customers while running a software project? We spoke to Shiv Sivaguru, who has a record of contributions to improvements in delivery practices on international software projects, to find out.

Q. What are some of the current development challenges organizations are facing?

The development challenges being faced by organizations are broadly based on changing customers expectations. There's increased pressure on pricing and shorter delivery lifecycles, which can no longer be one year or six months as it used to be. Customers also expect support for multiple platforms and multi-channel apps. Moreover, it's no longer about developing for a mainframe, or a desktop, etc. It's about extending existing customer apps with newer features on custom solutions or standard platforms they already have. The delivery team structure also has to change keeping this in mind. So there are more of feature-based teams or feature-based roadmaps delivering on a project. This is a direct result of the IT spending patterns of our customers. Most IT spending is about sustaining lights, and yet pressures of tech and industry that our customers operate in, means they have to come up with newer models for engagement, like Web 2.0, catching the Gen-Y, etc. This translates into leveraging what has already been invested on, by extending its functionality. At the back-end, you have to see how to structure the team to ensure fast delivery cycle. This requires inculcating multiple skills in the development team, providing a common development environment, which can integrate multiple processes seamlessly.

Q. What is your vision for providing an application development platform for developers to manage the shorter delivery cycles?

The biggest need is to bridge the organization's aspiration with that of the individual. An initiative like CMMI is driven more top-down, wherein the organization wants to mature the practices across the board. For team members, these are good initiatives that they can participate in and contribute, but they don't see any immediate benefit for themselves. So their needs have to also be taken into account--how can he/she be more productive, get feedback related to their own and their team's contribution and so on. Our vision is to have a common environment that can be used by all roles, contributing to a project. It is also necessary to have a common repository so that the intermediate work products are available to everyone at any point of time in same states. In other words a good ALM platform will provide these facilities at a low total cost of ownership.

Application development is no longer about one individual working on a project. Now, a typical software project could involve multiple teams located across the globe. Therefore, from an organizational practice perspective, we want to set up the right metrics/measurement based on activities that happen and not an estimate that people provide alone. The right measurements ensure that there's a balance and level of interest and creativity between individuals and the organization.

Q. What sort of a solution are you using at HCL to manage ALM? What sort of benefits does it bring to the table?

In mature software delivery environments when you commit to deliver you cannot say that “I'm almost 90% done”, etc, You need a connected vision of all phases of development to keep a track of things to be delivered as per the commitment. This is where the role of a repository, or a good configuration management practice becomes critical. As a result, almost all vendors are moving their offerings to a repository based ALM practice that handles development end-to-end, right from when the app is generated to its completion. The solution has to automate the whole chain.

Therefore, ALM is more of a platform, with individual tools that talk to each other. At HCL we cater to multiple customer needs that require multiple technologies and methodologies to be used. One of the key platforms we are standardizing on is Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio along with its plugins.

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