IBM defines an On Demand business as an enterprise whose business processes -- integrated end to end across the company and with key partners, suppliers, and customers -- can respond with flexibility and speed to any customer demand, market opportunity, or threat. A crucial step toward becoming an On Demand business is to implement a software development infrastructure that is proven, open, modular, and complete.
The right software development infrastructure can help your organization address today’s critical technology issues, including IT transformation, distributed development, enterprise architectures, product lifecycle management, and regulatory compliance.
It can also help you:
- Improve project ROI by maximizing use of individual, team, and operating resources.
- Leverage all available software development assets, including legacy systems and packaged applications.
- Adopt a business-driven development approach that increases business knowledge and value throughout the software lifecycle.
- Unify business, operations, and development teams by leveraging a consistent set of development tools, services and best practices.
How can you ensure that you are building an effective infrastructure for your organization? This four-part series is designed to help you. It explores criteria to consider as you create RFPs for new technology purchases and evaluate alternative vendors’ solutions. It also explains how the IBM Software Development Platform -- a modular, Eclipse-based technology platform -- can help you meet your requirements.
Part I looks at how to prioritize infrastructure acquisitions and begin constructing an RFP. Then, it examines how to specify and evaluate solutions in the requirements and analysis area. Part II will address purchasing issues for design, construction, and software quality; Part III will focus on deployment management and software configuration management purchasing issues; and Part IV will look at issues surrounding process and project management purchases.
Prioritizing software development investments
If you are part of a new team or organization, you may have the luxury of starting with a blank slate to assemble your software development tooling environment. You can purchase a set of tools designed to install, work, and upgrade together for maximum productivity and ease of use.
Of course, most organizations are not starting anew and cannot afford to take a “rip and replace" approach to their infrastructure. Instead, they need an incremental approach to infrastructure improvement that allows them to resolve critical development problems while continuing to leverage existing assets. So the first step in prioritizing infrastructure investments is to analyze the root cause of your persistent development problems. Technologies designed to resolve those problems and improve productivity should be at the top of your purchasing list, before the nice-to-haves. Then, it makes sense to further classify your priorities by infrastructure area, since that is how vendors classify their solutions: requirements and analysis; design and construction; software quality; software configuration management, deployment management; process; and project management.
Figure 1 shows an approach for analyzing and classifying problems in this way.
Figure 1: Analyzing and classifying typical software development problems
As you acquire new products incrementally, focusing on one area at a time, you will want to keep your infrastructure as flexible as possible. Purchasing tools based on an open source platform such as Eclipse allows you to select from an array of vendors as you move forward. And remember: Tool providers that leverage Eclipse focus their development efforts on creating unique features and quality code rather than on ensuring compatibility with a proprietary technology. Many offer Eclipse-based plug-in toolkits that will help you adapt your development environment to your specific needs. And you can also build your own Eclipse-based plug-ins with support from an ever-growing developer community.
Once you have prioritized the development problems you want to resolve and decided the technology platform(s) on which you want to standardize, the next step is to define your organization’s business goals for your RFP. Best are clear, high-level needs statements that all vendors can understand. For example:
- We need to reduce software development costs by improving both individual and team productivity.
- We want to avoid vendor, tool, or technology lock-in by ensuring that our infrastructure is open and extensible, and adheres to industry standards.
- We support a diverse set of languages, operating systems, databases, and development and deployment platforms. We want to acquire tools that can leverage these heterogeneous resources.
- We want to enhance team capability by adopting tools that support proven and flexible best practices.
Statements like these allow vendors to specify how their solutions address your particular needs. Table 1 shows how IBM might respond if these statements were in an RFP for a complete new infrastructure solution.
Table 1: Sample vendor responses to RFP for a complete software development infrastructure
Now, let’s suppose that strengthening your requirements and analysis capabilities is your first priority.
Building your requirements and analysis capability
Studies show that the most common causes of project failure relate to requirements and analysis shortcomings. Sound practices in this area can help you reduce project risk, ensure regulatory compliance, and keep your project running smoothly from start to finish.
The cornerstone of successful practices is a comprehensive requirements management solution that helps teams capture, communicate, and prioritize user needs. Then, you can integrate this solution with other tools in your development infrastructure to save time and avoid rework. The IBM Software Development Platform integrates requirements functions with defect tracking, visual development, and testing tools to jumpstart activities and provide each role on the team with a direct window into end-user needs. As requirements evolve, new information and changing priorities are efficiently communicated throughout the development project to ensure that end users, analysts, architects, and developers all work in lockstep to meet evolving business priorities.
Requirements and analysis solutions: a foundation for project success
For teams who are just starting to automate their requirements and analysis activities, a requirements management solution such as IBM Rational RequisitePro is the best place to start. It will focus team efforts on understanding and prioritizing user needs, effectively scoping projects, and making the right trade-off decisions as requirements evolve. Also look for more advanced capabilities you can use for discovering and documenting software assets, analyzing business processes, quantifying ROIs for alternative scenarios, modeling user interactions, and performing a simulated “test-drive" for a proposed solution.
As project requirements take shape, analysts can use a software modeling solution, such as IBM Rational Software Modeler, to model user interactions (business use cases) -- for both current and future business processes. Such solutions provide a critical linkage between end users needs, use cases and other requirements, and the application architecture.
A server-based business process modeling and monitoring solution, such as IBM WebSphere Business Integration Modeler and Monitor, provides a robust framework for understanding business processes and exploring alternative scenarios. By monitoring business processes as they are performed in actual work environments, these server-based solutions can analyze and document complex flows with a high degree of precision. A real-time monitoring capability documents resource utilization based on actual production scenarios and can help you uncover bottlenecks. Users can also assign costs to resources in order to understand ROIs for alternative scenarios. And, after you deliver your solution, analysts can compare expected to actual results, and even modify business processes interactively to make improvements.
An integral part of any proposed solution is data management -- how the system will organize, store, and retrieve data. A data modeling solution, such as IBM Rational Rose Data Modeler, allows database designers to create logical and physical views of database schema that clearly show how the application will manage data, so that they can resolve any problems before deployment.
Today, the vast majority of software projects involve integrating new applications with existing systems. Thorough asset analysis is a prerequisite for legacy transformation and asset reuse. With an automated asset analysis solution, teams can document their existing systems architecture and analyze interdependencies across heterogeneous environments, spanning mainframe to distributed platforms. For example, IBM WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer helps analysts and architects analyze software code and produce a “skeleton" of the application layout, complete with database calls, connection points to other applications, libraries, and sub-routines. This enables teams to identify which lines of code a proposed change would impact.
Requirements and analysis -- Sample RFP requirements
If you wanted solutions to address several weaknesses in your requirements and analysis processes, how should you describe your business goals to vendors? Defining your specific problems and challenges provides a good starting point:
- The demands of our business consistently outpace available technology resources. We need to develop a better way to capture, manage, and prioritize business needs.
- The cost of non-compliance with industry regulations can be catastrophic. We have to ensure compliance across the board -- without adding more head-count.
- Some of our legacy systems are inadequately documented; others are poorly architected. We need to find a better way to leverage and manage these systems as our enterprise architecture evolves.
- Our business stakeholders can’t even understand, much less approve, planned enhancements to the systems they rely on. We have to find a better way to communicate across business and technology domains.
- We must bring down the cost of doing business. We have identified several opportunities for business process optimization but want to estimate the ROI for each one before committing resources.
- When a priority request comes in from a specific customer, we need to be able to act quickly -- without destabilizing projects in progress.
From these specifics, you can then extract more general, solution-oriented needs statements like those in Table 2. Again, the table shows how IBM might respond to these expressed needs, based on its IBM Software Development Platform offerings.
Table 2: Sample vendor responses to RFP for a requirements and analysis infrastructure
Any vendor’s response to your RFP should directly address your stated needs. A list of corresponding benefits like the one in Table 2 shows that the vendor’s products can cover the organization’s needs and provides a starting point for investigating specific product offerings (of course, no other company offers the depth and breadth of products and capabilities that IBM does). In the next installment of this series, we’ll look at how to go about building an effective infrastructure in the design, construction, and software quality areas.
For more information about IBM requirements and analysis solutions, click on the links below:
IBM Rational RequisitePro
IBM Rational Software Modeler
IBM Rational Rose Data Modeler
IBM WebSphere Business Integration Modeler
IBM WebSphere Business Integration Monitor
IBM WebSphere Studio Asset Analyzer
As market manager for IBM Rational software, Robyn Gold evangelizes the vision and value of IBM Rational products and the IBM Software Development Platform. Before joining Rational software in 1999, she was the principal of GoldChip Communications, working with clients such as Corporate Software, Funk Software, Thinking Machines, Inc., Houghton Mifflin Interactive, and The Learning Company. Her prior marketing experience includes a three-year assignment at ITT World Directories in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She holds a BA from Brandeis University and an MBA from Northeastern University.
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