For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Microsoft Ups The ALM Ante With Its Bet On Teamprise

Expect VS 2010 To Accelerate The Shakeout In The Application Life-Cycle Management Market

by Jeffrey S. Hammond, November 16, 2009

Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) has proven very popular with .NET developers but not so much with Eclipse developers. This presents a problem for Microsoft, because many of its largest customers develop for both .NET and Java and want a consolidated . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Application Life Cycles And Fates: Differentiate Between Strategic Intent And Tactical Necessities

by Phil Murphy, August 24, 2009

The application portfolios of large IT organizations are coming under increasing scrutiny as tempting targets for streamlining to increase agility and reduce waste. Applications professionals often seek to assign a label to each application that indicates . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Software Configuration Management Tool Adoption Trends In The Americas

by Jeffrey S. Hammond, June 18, 2009

Over the past three years, respondents to Forrester's annual Enterprise And SMB Software Survey have demonstrated increasing awareness and adoption of application life-cycle management (ALM) processes and tools. ALM 2.0 — the next generation of tool support . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Strategies To Cut Application Costs And Increase Productivity Using Application Mining Tools

Increase Productivity And Quality While Reducing Exposure To Risk

by Phil Murphy, April 24, 2009

Today's economic climate demands that applications professionals do more with less: more new development, more maintenance, more integration, and more technology change to support wild fluctuations in the pace of business change. A tall order in good . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Application Mining Benefits Calculator  (152 KB XLS)

by Phil Murphy, April 24, 2009

This is a customizable calculator to help you determine if application mining would be beneficial to your organization.

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Best Practices: Software Development Processes

A Framework For Improving And Modernizing Your Software Development Life Cycle

by Dave West, April 15, 2009

Software development processes are in a state of transition, with lightweight Agile development approaches challenging traditional software development life cycles (SDLCs). Professional organizations add to the confusion with approaches such as The Project . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Platform-As-A-Service Is Here; Can It Help You?

The Opportunities And Risks Of PaaS For Application Development Shops

by John R. Rymer, February 10, 2009

The nascent and overhyped idea that organizations should move their applications from on-premise data centers to Internet "clouds" has hit platforms. "Platform-as-a-service" (PaaS) isn't theory; Forrester has found 20 products available today — several . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

European Software Configuration Management Tool Adoption Trends

by Jeffrey S. Hammond, December 23, 2008

Over the past three years, Forrester's annual Enterprise And SMB Software Survey has shown increasing awareness and adoption of application life-cycle management (ALM) processes and tools. ALM 2.0 — the next generation of tool support for ALM — is a work . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

App Dev's Role In Bridging The Embedded Software Development Gap

by Roy C. Wildeman, December 16, 2008

As the world market for products with embedded software expands, a persistent gap between software development and other systems engineering disciplines is leading to myriad quality problems, costs, and recalls. Increasingly, application development professionals . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Application Modernization Taxonomy Clarifies Choices And Paves A Path For Progress

by Phil Murphy, October 17, 2008

Modernizing aging application portfolios presents application development and program management professionals with a bevy of confusing choices — the IT industry uses terms with overlapping and conflicting meanings that have ultimately lost all clarity. . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Use Action-Oriented Categories To Guide Application Life-Cycle Investment Decisions

Human Life-Cycle Analogies Provide No Value And Introduce Bias

by Phil Murphy, October 17, 2008

Excessive IT costs have application development and program management professionals searching for ways to reduce wasteful spending within their application portfolios. Many organizations begin the process by describing applications using human terms . . .

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

Bridging The Embedded Software Development Gap

Approaches For Integrating Product Software Within Complex Systems Design

by Roy C. Wildeman, September 5, 2008

To compete on innovation and deliver high-end functionality, manufacturers are embedding more and more software into their products — and finding that software bugs and compatibility failures can cripple new product introduction (NPI) profits. To address . . .

For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

All Interfaces Are Not Created Equal

Adjust Life-Cycle Management Policies To Improve Agility

by Larry Fulton, July 1, 2008

Conventional wisdom regarding service-oriented architecture (SOA) governance — or, more specifically, SOA service life-cycle management — would suggest that more governance is always better. Yet, treating every interface equally can increase the burden . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

ALM 2.0: Getting Closer, But Not There Yet

by Carey Schwaber, Mike Gilpin, June 19, 2008

The term ALM 2.0, which Forrester coined in 2006, refers to the next generation of tool support for application life-cycle management (ALM). In the past two years, vendors have made progress in moving from ALM 1.0 to ALM 2.0, but no vendor has yet developed . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

Tech Horizons: Evaluating StackSafe's Test Center Risk Reduction Solution

Its Virtual Sandbox Aims To Reduce Application Deployment Risks

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, June 6, 2008

The popularity of change and configuration management solutions is a testimony to the vital role that controlling change plays in an IT operation. Deploying a new application — or changes to an existing application — on an existing infrastructure is an . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Enterprise Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM) Adoption In 2007  (194 KB PPT)

by Carey Schwaber, March 6, 2008

These data charts discuss trends seen in enterprise application life-cycle management (ALM) in 2007.

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

Case Study: A US Airline Sustains A Rapid Pace Of Software Change

by Carey Schwaber, February 19, 2008

Because airlines face intense competitive pressure, their application development organizations have to be able to change gears quickly. To this end, one US airline's application development group has adopted an iterative development process and established . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

Sourcefire And Snort Are In Harmony With The Open Source And Commercial World

by Michael Goulde, Jennifer Albornoz Mulligan, January 23, 2007

Sourcefire balances its own contributions and the contributions of its users very well. Because the firm plays in a market that requires continual product additions (new detection rules), Sourcefire constantly interacts with both corporate users and community . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

SugarCRM Finds The Sweet Spot In Customer Relationship Management

by Michael Goulde, Jennifer Albornoz Mulligan, January 23, 2007

SugarCRM was founded in April 2004 and has grown to support 900 paying customers and 50 languages. The firm boasts 150 resellers in 30 countries and 5,000 developers contributing translations, bug fixes, and extensions to the product. Because SugarCRM's . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

How To Turn An Open Source Product Into A Commercial Business

by Michael Goulde, Jennifer Albornoz Mulligan, January 23, 2007

Not so long ago, making money off open source projects seemed like a radical — and in some circles, even heretical — idea. Today, firms like MySQL and Sourcefire are reaping the benefits of building commercial businesses around an open source project. . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

Making Nessus Tenable

by Michael Goulde, Jennifer Albornoz Mulligan, January 23, 2007

Nessus started as a one-man project written over a free weekend. It has since grown to be used at an estimated 85,000 organizations, with hundreds of thousands of users. After three years spent developing Nessus, founder Renaud Deraison converted it into . . .

For CIOs

CIOs: Reduce Costs By Scoring Applications

Lower Maintenance Costs And Change IT Demand Governance

by Phil Murphy, January 10, 2007

As long as IT spends the majority of the IT budget for "lights on" operational and maintenance activities against existing applications, CIOs will be criticized by business executives for their inability to respond fast enough to new business needs. IT . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

CIOs Should Rethink Selling Internal Applications As Packaged Software

Amateur Vendors Bring High Risk And Uncertain Rewards

by Phil Murphy, November 2, 2006

CIOs who believe that they can repackage internally developed applications as commercial software offerings to recoup their initial development costs should think again. CIOs that are not currently delighting their business peers and exceeding their expectations . . .

The Changing Face Of Application Life-Cycle Management

Tomorrow's ALM Platforms Will Deliver On The Promise Of Today's ALM Suites

by Carey Schwaber, August 18, 2006

IT organizations spend billions of dollars a year on development life-cycle tools that don't play well together. The result? For most shops, application life-cycle management (ALM) — the coordination of development life-cycle activities — is still largely . . .

European Companies Push Revised Pricing Models For Application Maintenance

by Richard Peynot, June 6, 2006

With many companies in renewal cycles and many new maintenance deals in the pipeline, application maintenance is a promising market for the next five years. As maintenance budgets have reached impressive levels, companies are looking for price reductions . . .