Application Delivery: The game is changing

Change has been with us, seemingly forever. This is certainly the case in business and technology, and especially so when it comes to one of the most critical areas of business: application delivery

Nothing endures but change. - Heraclitus, 6th Century B.C.

Application delivery refers to all of the processes, including development, testing, and tuning, that must be performed before production deployment. There's a clear indication that change is occurring in the application delivery approach. In the process of talking to customers about the business and technical trends that are driving change, Mercury learned that the following have a tremendous impact on application delivery.

Increasing complexity: Here are some of the factors that create enormous complexity in the IT environment.

1) New systems and networks built on top of legacy environments. 2) Client-server applications and new web services. 3) Service-oriented architectures. 4) New device types and increasing mobility. 5) Greater line of business (LOB) influence and application development direction on IT purchase decisions. 6) New application platforms such as n-tier web applications, J2EE, and .Net. 7) Distributed application development and delivery teams.

Centralisation and consolidation: Cost is king. Customers want to consolidate their systems, tools and vendors as well as centralise control of their application delivery processes and resources. IT departments want to regain control of the various LOB technologies and methodologies, and integrate them into a unified set of repeatable processes.

Ecosystem approach: To deliver effective, high-quality applications, it takes more than a talented team of coders and testers. It takes the collaboration, commitment and participation of all stakeholders inside and outside the company. Expertise and experience from users, management, partners and suppliers must be considered during the delivery process.

Strategic sourcing: Companies are taking advantage of the low-cost, high-skill, 24-hour workforce by optimising resources among outsourced, in-house and offshore teams. Each of these geographically diverse teams bring different aptitudes and perspectives on quality and performance to the application delivery process. A common quality and performance standard is required. This drives substantial changes to application delivery processes, but it also brings substantial rewards.

Compliance and governance: Regulations and mandates such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the EU Data Protection Directive, HIPAA, Basel II and International Accounting Standards now require constant changes to business software from order entry to billing, accounting and finance.

The changes are substantial and significant. One customer reported that their company makes up to 20,000 changes to their business software per day. This puts immense pressure on application delivery processes because all software changes must be rigorously tested, and any issues isolated, addressed, documented and validated before deployment.

The simple fact is that quality application delivery is no longer just about quality assurance (QA). QA teams can no longer think that they can deliver perfect applications without the support of other players. The legacy model— where developers hand over code to QA personnel, who run their tests before delivering final code to operations— is becoming less and less effective, especially when each department has its own process with the market conditions listed above.

Successful companies: Those that maintain a competitive edge seize the initiative and take charge of change. QA groups that are centralising and consolidating expertise—and making it available to all application groups—are driving quality as a strategic pillar in application delivery. Some of the key emerging trends for meeting quality requirements:

• It takes a new application delivery approach, oriented around repeatable processes and a Centre of Excellence (CoE) model. CoE is a virtual model that aligns with the nature of strategic sourcing and complexity; the infrastructure and processes are centralised, but the people are not.
• It's not just QA. It takes a highly coordinated ecosystem—collaboration among in-house and outsourced developers, business analysts, IT operations, capacity planners, even partners, suppliers, and customers—to deliver applications that truly meet business objectives.
• One size does not fit all, one methodology or set of processes won't work for everyone. But a Centre of Excellence approach can incorporate and leverage existing culture, structure, business goals, and so on.

Shortcomings of the traditional model of application delivery:

At most companies today, the application delivery process is a series of discrete tasks such as requirements generation, coding, unit and functional testing, performance, tuning, and so on. Typically, each task or phase of the application lifecycle is the exclusive domain of specialists. Each team of specialists does its job and hands it over to the next team. The assumption is that if each team performs its task correctly, the end-result will be a high-quality, high-performance application that meets business and end-user requirements.

Currently, application recall is a more frequently practised discipline than application delivery. That must change.

Business-centric application delivery model:

It's seven times more expensive to fix issues in production, according to Carnegie Mellon. Forty percent of all problems are found by end users, says a Gartner report. In this context, a practical approach to quality delivery is the business-centric application delivery model.

Few executives today would dispute that business success depends on IT-enabled business processes. Yet few companies manage the quality, performance, and availability of their applications from a business perspective. They deliver applications as they always have.

With the business-centric application delivery model, many of Mercury's customers are focusing on business objectives, business values and business processes rather than just QA tasks, tools and technologies. People need to work from the top down, not from the bottom up. For example, under the business-centric application delivery model you can:

• Reduce application delivery costs.
• Constantly improve operational efficiencies by measuring and reporting KPIs.
• Align IT objectives with business priorities and keep them aligned throughout the application lifecycle.
• Right-size the environment with the best components at the lowest cost.
• Raise the quality.
• Quantify and manage application quality, performance and availability issues from a business and end-user perspective. Share knowledge and best practices across departments and LOBs, raising the value of existing intellectual capital. Improve morale among application delivery teams by increasing their visibility within the organisation and their effectiveness in doing their jobs.

T Srinivasan, Managing Director, Mercury India The advantages of engaging third-party testing services have been proven beyond doubt for software firms and their clients