Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 - (Page 22)

d09caril_p3db 7/14/08 8:58 AM Page 22 Core Technology APPLICATION LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT MEETS MODEL-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT continued from page 20 Essentially, a defect, bug, story, feature, idea, or suggestion is a requirement if it results in a code change. Within the ALM ecosystem, requirements are the foundation from which all things evolve—they serve as the thread that ties together all phases of the product lifecycle. To maximize return on investment in the ALM environment, it is essential to align the organization’s development efforts with internal and external customer requirements. Because requirements are the key driver to align the business with engineering within software development lifecycle, a requirement-driven approach to ALM is fundamental. Whether you are developing a product, system, or an application, a requirementsdriven approach lets you ensure that the goals of the business and your customers’ needs are prioritized into requirements that remain persistent and auditable throughout every phase of the development process. Another big piece of ALM is change management. Change requests, inevitable in any organization, can come from many sources and can take various forms; for example, bug fixes, customer proposals, enhancement requests, action items, platform changes, defects, and help-desk tickets. In addition, controlling changes to products, establishing relationships between them, managing different versions, assessing the impact of changes, and auditing and reporting the changes can overwhelm any organization. Producing or reproducing a product with controlled incremental changes, comparing different releases, and analyzing the differences are all activities essential to success. Small teams may be able to manage changes in an ad-hoc manner. But, as the team grows and its development becomes more complex, lack of effective change and configuration management across all phases of the development lifecycle will cause changes to spiral out of control and jeopardize the success of the project. A more robust approach to change management in ALM integrates software configuration management. A change-oriented approach for configuration management Figure 1: The fundamentals of the ALM ecosystem. ensures the consistency of the development team’s deliverables and workspaces through a workflow driven by logical changes (such as fixes and enhancements) that often span multiple files. It accelerates development by identifying and resolving integration problems. When integrated with change management, software configuration management lets change requests drive development tasks. Configuration management, a discipline that is essential for success, supports parallel development, distributed development, factoring, and versioning. It encourages re-use through a single repository that contains a single version of the truth that reflects what is actually happening in the development process. An integrated requirements-driven process for ALM makes is easy to prove requirements are traced to their implementation requests, which in turn are linked to development tasks and objects. This ensures that developers are focused on the right priorities, have the latest updated information, and also have access to the full context of their assignments. Analysts, business managers, and auditors have full real-time visibility into the implementation. By connecting the development process, the right tool, and the people, a requirements-driven approach unifies traditionally separate processes of the development lifecycle into a single connected process that drives the entire development lifecycle. Unifying requirements across the entire ALM ecosystem enables information exchange and collaborative communications. It also accelerates response to changes in customer requirements, process, organization, and technology. When it comes to implementation and delivery of requirements, you can take either a hand-coding or a model-based approach to ALM. However, if you decide to take the model-driven development path, you have access to all the benefits that MDD provides. Model-Driven Development MDD lets you manage complexity by providing a way to make big picture decisions first, only adding details as needed. This solves the typical development conundrum of relying on implementation experts to create the Figure 2: Model-driven development workflow. 22 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l September 2008 http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook A Conversation With Erik Demaine Application Lifecycle Management Meets Model-Driven Development Building a Robust Development Environment Real Users Really Matter Matching Wildcards: An Algorithm The Android Mobile Phone Platform Managing Application Thread Use Signalling Integer Overflows in Java .NET Development & the IBM WebSphere Portal Server The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

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