 |
Companies must choose a balanced mix of metrics to get the true picture of how their application development (AD) organizations are functioning. Many IT organizations don't measure development teams' productivity, quality, or cost effectiveness, yet they are being asked to improve all three dimensions.
The Balanced Scorecard model provides an effective framework for choosing a blend of metrics that address the operational excellence (i.e., quality, productivity, and costs), user orientation, business value, and future orientation of the AD organization. Times have changed: Quality and productivity improvement alone won't cut it for most organizations! AD managers must move out of their comfort zones of measuring these traditional operational excellence metrics and redirect their focus to measuring the value that they're delivering to their customers and to the business.
While Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) may strike fear into the hearts of many companies, the controls and monitoring practices required are nothing new to quality assurance (QA) organizations. Indeed, companies with well-developed and respected QA groups will find themselves ahead of the game when it comes to SOX compliance.
QA's independence from application development and the checks and balances performed by QA groups already ensure adherence to best practices. Those companies that don't have it should seriously consider implementing formal QA to standardize and document current processes for improvement and should leverage those practices for continued SOX compliance.
To achieve tight software development life-cycle tool integration, firms can either adopt comprehensive, integrated tool suites, or they can select and integrate a set of lightweight tools. Lightweight tools are single-purpose point tools that have open interfaces to enable easy integration with other tools.
A number of factors -- most notably, the strength and popularity of integration frameworks like Eclipse -- have increased the appeal of the lightweight approach, and lightweight tool sets have some advantages over comprehensive tool suites. But firms should proceed with caution, as lightweight tool sets also have significant disadvantages, as well as hidden costs.
|
|
|
Geronimo! IBM Scores A J2EE Coup
The Apache Software Foundation's widely anticipated Gluecode Standard Edition, which is based on the Geronimo J2EE server, will now fill in the low end of IBM's WebSphere product line. IBM made this move by buying privately held Gluecode Software, the leading commercial provider of the Geronimo code. The acquisition expands IBM's open source strategy to include a free-product/paid-support model. No other major J2EE provider has IBM's breadth of J2EE platform offerings, and BEA Systems, Oracle, SAP, and particularly Sun Microsystems will have to respond to IBM's move, which represents a further reshaping of the software industry to accommodate open source business models, as well as a move to support simpler, lightweight platform strategies.
Your Strategic SOA Platform Vision
Your service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform -- the software infrastructure and tools you use to build, configure, deploy, monitor, and manage services -- heavily influences your ability to get the benefits of service orientation. Rather than buying a single product, you will likely build your strategic SOA platform from multiple products, providing functions like security, transactions, versioning, events, messaging, a service repository, and many more. But you can't build it all at once, nor should you try. Instead, use an SOA platform vision to guide a stepwise evolution that starts with your current application platform and develops in line with your path(s) to SOA.
|
The Forrester Wave: Application Server Platforms, Q1 2005
Application server platforms are the foundation for composite applications. Products in this category vary widely in their breadth of features, architectural cohesion, and market presence. Extensive lab-based analysis of the top seven platforms as the basis for composite applications reveals that the leading options are Oracle Application Server 10g Enterprise Edition and a suite of Microsoft's Windows Server System products. IBM's WebSphere software platform and BEA Systems' WebLogic Platform 8.1, the market's leading application server vendors, are also strong products. SAP has emerged as a strong challenger to the leaders. Our analysis also reveals that this category is still in its infancy, and there's still much to be done to simplify composite application development, deployment, and management for customers.
The Elements Of SOA Maturity
In a November 2004 survey, Forrester found that 29% of large enterprises are pursuing service-oriented architecture (SOA) at an enterprise level. Furthermore, of the large enterprises using SOA by the end of 2005, 25% use it for strategic business transformation. A strategic level of SOA business impact -- beyond a mere shift of application integration architecture -- requires IT to transform itself into a service-oriented IT (SO-IT) organization. The maturity of an SOA strategy is a function of IT's maturity for business collaboration, business process design, IT governance, architecture planning, infrastructure migration, IT skills and organization, the service delivery life cycle, and business value measurement.
From The Editor
This edition of ADI First Look highlights the continuing connection between platforms, tools, people, process, and metrics in improving application development and increasing the business impact of IT. The ongoing battle between complexity and simplicity continues to provide fodder for research, with lightweight tools and application servers both getting notice of late.
Forrester's GigaWorld IT Forum 2005 in Dallas, which took place earlier in May, was a great Event for the ADI team. The huge number of one-on-ones provided us with an opportunity to develop our relationships with many of you, deepening our understanding of the real issues you face and enabling us to offer even more targeted advice. Now we look forward to GigaWorld IT Forum Europe 2005 in Prague, June 6-8, where we hope to do the same again with European clients -- for those who didn't already make the trip to Dallas!
One of the things that we did at GigaWorld this year that was particularly exciting was to extend our recent experimentation with blogs to the "Live at GigaWorld" blog. I posted some thoughts to my blog coming out of GigaWorld, and they are posted to the live-at-GigaWorld blog, as well: Information Fabric - Killer When Offered as a Service? If you are a Forrester client, you can read this blog and also respond, and I'd be very interested in your comments on this idea.
Mike Gilpin
Vice President, Research Director
mikegilpin@forrester.com
Upcoming Application Development & Infrastructure ForrTels
ForrTels are live, interactive, hour-long teleconferences incorporating a simultaneous WebEx slide presentation by a Forrester analyst, followed by an open forum for questions and discussion.
Who Uses Lightweight Life-Cycle Tools -- And Why?
May 31, 2005, 1-2 p.m. Eastern time
by Carey Schwaber
Making Your Enterprise Database Highly Available
June 8, 2005, 1-2 p.m. Eastern time
by Noel Yuhanna
Agile Processes For The Enterprise
June 9, 2005, 1-2 p.m. Eastern time
by Liz Barnett
Or download a previous ForrTel:
Eclipse Changes The Game For Application Development
by Carl Zetie
EMAIL: Email this issue to a colleague.
PRINT: View a printer-friendly version of this issue.
VIEW ARCHIVE: View past issues of First Look.
TECHNICAL SUPPORT: Call the Client Resource Center
1 866/FORRESTER (1 866/367-7378) or +1 617/613-5730.
EMAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS: If you'd like to subscribe or unsubscribe to First Look, please go to your Email Subscriptions page.
|
|
|
Entire contents 1997-2005, Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Forrester, Forrester Oval Program, Forrester Wave, ForrTel, Forrester's
Ultimate Consumer Panel, WholeView 2, Technographics, TechRankings, and
Total Economic Impact are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc. All other
trademarks are the property of their respective companies. Forrester
clients may make one attributed copy or slide of each figure contained
herein. Additional reproduction is strictly prohibited. For additional
reproduction rights and usage information, go to www.forrester.com.
Information is based on best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment
at the time and are subject to change.
Forrester Research, Inc., 400 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA 02139
|
