“An increased focus on measurable, more-agile processes and on service orientation is altering staffing, tools and methods of software development. In parallel, governance, planning, control and quality assurance are being refined and strengthened to drive better predictability and support sourcing.”
“Hype Cycle for Application Development”, Gartner Research, July 2009
How do you Plan, Build, and Run the new technologies that are critical to meeting business objectives?
Several key trends are shaping the enterprise development environment. Technology and governance advances are improving the speed, agility and quality of software delivery and the business utility of application development (AD) tools. Service-oriented development of applications (SODA) and Web-oriented architecture (WOA) are driving the alteration of methods and tools, and the convergence of runtime and development time facilities. Techniques and tools to improve the planning, measurement, control and reporting of application development and delivery activities are advancing quickly. Collaborative, cross-functional integration is being added to toolsets to help deal with the challenges of geographically distributed teams, and teams using agile methods. Other changes are being introduced to accommodate the needs of rich Internet applications and new deployment alternatives like the cloud.
As with all other IT disciplines, application development organizations are under pressure to become financially effective. Formal processes must be implemented to achieve the goal of running IT as a business, with budgeting disciplines and effective planning techniques that lead to predictable results. Although individually incremental, the convergence of changes in governance, planning and control techniques are transformative when taken across all topic areas.
Through collaborative and integration efforts, application development environments and architectures will become more efficient and cost-effective.