|
Application development involves methods and practices for developing and deploying applications. Traditionally, application development involved activities performed by company IT staff. However, this discipline has changed greatly in recent years. Application development organizations are no longer simply described as "package shops" or "custom shops." Today, most organizations blend traditional development styles with composite applications, software as a service (SaaS), business process management (BPM) and end-user development. They also blend their own resources with externally acquired people and services. The choices and trade-offs involved in managing these different elements of application development have made leading an application organization more complex and challenging than ever. 
Consider These Factors to Determine Your Readiness Because of the growing complexity of running the contemporary application development organization, application development leaders must consider the following factors:
- How can we become more agile? What does agile development really mean, and how does it differ from traditional application development methods?
- What guidelines should we use when choosing between best-of-breed and single-vendor approaches to application development tools?
- What are best practices for developing applications using service-oriented development of applications (SODA) and composite applications?
- How do we determine software quality levels that are "good enough"? How can we detect more application quality defects prior to the testing phase?
- What are best practices for incorporating new development languages and tools?
Conduct Your Application Development Investigation in Six Phases Gartner recommends that application development leaders follow six major phases to pursue their initiatives (these phases may vary, based on your organization's adoption of a given topic):
- Strategize and Plan: Develop and communicate a vision for how the development function will operate, then live that vision.
- Assess Current State: Assess your practices against those of best-in-class organizations to identify gaps and improvement opportunities.
- Assess Competencies: Determine best practices for delivering software, and assess competencies needed for those best practices. Understand that the choices involved have become much more complex, making learning new best practices critical.
- Gain Approval: Understand how to gain approval for application projects, and how to acquire the technology needed to implement applications.
- Implement: Determine how software should be deployed, and what specific recommendations can be made to aid in that deployment.
- Operate and Evolve: Measure the deployment results and improve them.
|
|
