1 Accelerating Business Agility with Modern ALM Practices Business agility with quality and scale Issue 1 2 Welcome 3 Case Study 6 From the Gartner Files: What IT Leaders Need to Know About Cloud SDLC Services 10 Bringing It Together Featuring research from 2 Welcome Thank you for downloading the Accelerating Our goal in this newsletter is to help companies Business Agility with Modern ALM Practices see the practical impact and competitive newsletter. To support your initiatives in advantage an Application Lifecycle Management leveraging software and competitive applications (ALM) solution can have on their business. to drive your business evolution, including Microsoft’s Visual Studio ALM is an end to end, research from Gartner, we have compiled a set integrated solution that allows you to orchestrate of competitive market resources for you. The and deliver complex software with the highest Application Lifecycle Process including what quality, at a faster pace, and at a lower cost. This software gets built, how it gets built and who is the new, modern formula of capturing quality, decides what to build is evolving. No longer speed, and cost in one ‘box’. can companies stay competitive and grow their business without thinking about software. Looking forward to hearing from you! Tiffany Treacy GM Developer Tools Marketing, Microsoft FIGURE 1 Featured Case Study: Columbia Sportswear Company Source: Microsoft 3 Case Study Columbia Sportswear Company’s motto, “Trying Integrate your business intelligence strategy with “When you want to Stuff Since 1938,” goes far beyond product your ALM solution to give you the fast feedback achieve this goal of development. They understand that their software and reaction time you need to stay on top. being able to build is just as important to their customers as the and change at the technology in their apparel and shoes. The Bottom Line speed of business, You need modern, capable, adaptable IT, focused it is time to start And Columbia, like so many companies today, on delivering value to both your external and looking at newer ALM recognizes that a traditional web storefront internal customers. offerings that provide isn’t enough. They’re investing in innovative, a more complete engaging applications that deepen their customer When you’re operating at enterprise scale, solution with the relationship and differentiate their brand—like narrowly-targeted lifecycle tools don’t mix well. flexibility to support Columbia’s GPS PAL™, a cross-device mobile They become clunky and slow, and introduce both on-premise and journaling app linked to a separate tracking bottlenecks and risk into your process—just in a cloud-based website. where you can least afford it. An ALM solution development.” for the enterprise will bring together all of the – SearchSoftwareQuality, To deliver these innovative solutions, Columbia elements you need for success, and integrate them 2011 Sportswear development team applies modern seamlessly and cost-effectively. ALM practices using Microsoft Visual Studio. A New Approach Columbia is racing ahead. What are you doing to keep up? To stay in front of your competitors? Today’s software applications demand new skillsets and new ways of thinking. Whether Engagement: The new normal you build projects in-house or outsource them, everyone in your organization will have a role to In 2011, Forbes pointed out that consumers will play in their success. use technology to engage with your company whether you invite them to or not. If you aren’t True business agility is a mindset, and it extends managing your presence online and in social to the highest levels in your organization. Agility media, your company’s critics may be managing it brings lean thinking, creativity, and flexibility into for you. your decision-making processes. Even if your core business is not consumer-facing, Above all, business agility relies on understanding. startups and hobbyists can access and aggregate An agile company relies on strategic metrics to “If you’re a little bit publicly-available data about your company to make its most important business decisions. You reach surprising insights. off course at the end need reliable data to make the right business of two weeks, that’s a decisions. Software needs to be designed for pretty easy correction. Do you want to know what they know? What if you measurability, and its data must be meaningful could put them to work for you? If you’re off course and current. after six or 12 months, Using real-time analytics, Microsoft Studios’ 343 that’s a complete Three key metrics are critical to your success. First, rework. It can cost you Industries was able to respond to cheating patterns the flow of business value must be measured and during an online multiplayer Halo 4 tournament. millions of dollars.” improved. Understanding what provides business – Columbia, 2012 They quickly identified users who were trying to value, and delivering those features on a sustained, game the system. Their fast turnaround saved the regular cadence is key. Secondly, you must be game experience for honest players. able to identify and remove bottlenecks in order to reduce the cycle time for delivering that business You already knew you needed business value. It’s not enough to simply deliver regularly, intelligence. Now you need it faster, and from a you need the information at your fingertips to wider range of data sources. With the right data, identify and remove the speed bumps slowing and the ability to respond quickly to emerging you down. Finally, you need to be able to identify trends, your business is ready for whatever and eliminate sources of rework, such as bugs, challenge or opportunity you discover. incorrectly specified features and the like. The right 4 metrics can identify this failure demand, and point One size doesn’t fit all. Business agility must take you in the right direction to eliminate it. into account your organization’s history, structure, and culture. Tools that try to impose a single out- An ALM solution built around metrics, instead of-box solution are likely to be too rigid to use, or of guesswork, provides total traceability and too narrowly-focused to be useful. You need a tool customizable views into the work of your that grows and evolves with you, and a tool that organization. This allows unprecedented flexibility brings roles together instead of segmenting them to manage your processes your way, to get agile at apart. your own pace. Agility your way “This transition Leadership Prescriptive software development methodologies to a new world of At all organizational levels, your development provide a textbook approach to process responsiveness and teams need connected tools to coordinate and improvement and have been successful for many agility will be painful measure their work. This is especially true if your organizations. Yet thousands of companies are and require a new teams are geographically distributed or if some of finding another way: using agile and lean practices mind-set.” the work is outsourced. Some organizations have to adopt agile in their own way, at their own speed. – Forbes, 2011 invested heavily in measuring “progress”, but do you know how to measure success? Value? ROI? By overlaying agile principles on top of their existing processes, teams are finding that they What difference does it make when it’s going to can gradually introduce agility without the risks be done, if you don’t know whether it was worth of dramatic change. By focusing on the flow of doing? value through the software delivery pipeline, these teams are improving cycle time, reducing mean- One way leaders can support building the right time-to-repair and eliminating bottlenecks. This thing is to use the Build-Measure-Learn cycle focus drives them to be ever more agile. popularized by Eric Reis in The Lean Startup. Leaders have their work cut out for them. They Introducing a flow based method like Kanban must avoid vanity metrics and focus on metrics on top of your existing process can help you that matter. They must be willing to aggressively to gradually introduce an agile cadence to cut losing efforts and pivot to something that your organization. Kanban helps you visualize works. They must aggressively focus on getting bottlenecks and highlights where the next marketplace feedback from the smallest possible improvement should be made. product or feature that will give them valuable data. And they must support fast failures, while You don’t need to adopt a prescriptive eliminating the failure averse culture so many methodology wholesale to become more agile. firms exhibit. You can adopt agile on your own terms and on your own timeline, the key is to have tools that Business agility is hard. It demands constant allow you to customize your unique structure and communication, coordination and transparency. functional needs To connect your empowered teams, you need the right tools for the right roles. Decision-makers Quality Enablement don’t need to be bogged down with complex “Business people… Agility without quality does not deliver value, an tools – they need lightweight dashboards where emphasis on quality without agility usually results didn’t always know their Key Performance Indicators really stand what they wanted in value being delivered late to realize business out. Developers demand the best development opportunities with the needed sense of urgency. until they’d seen environments, optimized for the platform and what they Whether the software “meets the spec” is probably language they code in. Perhaps you have cross- the least important aspect of quality today. Quality didn’t want.” functional teams where members wear several – Columbia, 2012 Enablement entails full lifecycle ALM practices hats each? All the more reason to want tools that that enable development teams to strike the hard are optimized for specific activities, yet closely balance between agility and quality.