On the integration of software life cycle

Over the years, software delivery has been viewed as an ancillary business process. Although software delivery costs an enterprise a great deal of cost, it has never been a concern for business because it does not have a rigorous system architecture like supply chain management, financial management, and human capital Management.

However, the creation, implementation, development and maintenance of software becomes particularly important as more and more enterprises make software delivery a key part of their business operations. In particular, software is becoming more complex with the advent of mobile technology, cloud technology and open networks. Not only is software innovation a competitive advantage, but it will have real business value if it can deliver software faster and at a lower price than a competitor. After all, it's often not the idea of who comes first with a new product or service, but who first enters the market to deliver the product or service.

Software delivery is a series of separate processes, not just a single integration process.

Software delivery is not only a billions of dollar industry, but also the internal demand of the main business process. The ability to deliver software can drive business innovation and hinder business innovation. The time, innovation ability and quality of the software entering the market will become the key factor to determine the company's competitiveness. Compared to other traditional business processes, software delivery has no mature model, just a unordered set of different technologies and tools.

Portfolio planning, project management, requirements, design, development, testing, and deployment have well-defined processes and tools, but they are not effective in integrating, collaborating, and cooperating smoothly. The same business is defined countless times throughout its lifecycle, from the planning design stage to the definition, development, and testing, each group redefining the project artifacts according to their needs and tools. Spreadsheets, mailings, and wikis (wikis) are used to consolidate all processes, which are not only a cost, but they often create another system to record lifecycle processes and their integrations.

Methods such as Lean Entrepreneurship (Lean startup), Operational dimension Development (DEVOPS), and Agile Development (agile) motivate organizations to reassess their development practices to achieve the desire to accelerate tempo and increase feedback. Although many organizations have adopted agile models and tried to apply operational dimension development (DEVOPS), these initiatives focus on engineering teams and their practice activities.

Business Agility (Business agility) requires seamless integration with the business through a workflow such as engineering, management, and customer processes, but this is a far cry from what we see today.

The following two sections outline our reality today:

Unrelated majors are becoming leaner but less lean

Henry Ford and the Industrial Revolution told us that dividing the division of labor and departmental hierarchies into professional divisions was the best way to improve efficiency and concentration. Once the problem becomes more complex, the organization becomes complex to solve the problem. As it teams grow in size, their processes, management structures, and hierarchies increase accordingly. Over time, discipline has evolved beyond the capabilities of developers to create independent workgroups, such as requirements, design, and test groups. Agile Development sees this independent workgroup as a key reason for the failure of project development and requires the creation of cross-functional teams. The reality is that, even in the same team, different roles use different methods, different measures and tools to solve the same problem.

Even in agile teams, developers and business analysts use different tools to encourage different ways of working. Traditional test tools describe problems from a test perspective, and development tools look at issues from a developer's perspective. These tools divide software delivery into several processes by introducing different vocabularies, controls, and processing steps. Process improvement is usually at the level of the functional unit rather than across the entire software development and delivery process.

Imagine a factory that optimizes every step of the process, but its products are still of low quality and too expensive. This is the Lean Entrepreneurship (Lean) production revolution prior to the carmaker's experience. Henry Ford's traditional production model is flawed in managing process changes, product complexity, and product flexibility, which are required by modern automotive manufacturing. The adoption of Lean Entrepreneurship (Lean) means that the end-to-end process is viewed from a holistic perspective, which, at the enterprise level rather than at the departmental or specific job level, enables the organization to reduce waste and add value.

This is also bound to lead to clear process ownership, architecture, automation, and architecture – concepts that are lacking in the software development industry.

In software development, we still have:

In the end-to-end process, ownership is missing. If an organization does not consider the whole, then ownership of the entire process will be split into several groups. For example, the quality group does the testing, the Business Analysis group, and the report is done by the PMO. Such a division has left everyone without the will to change as a whole.

There is no clear system architecture and roadmap for upgrading levels. Individuals and teams to implement new technologies and related practices, in order to make their work simpler, in the relevant software delivery practices, they have a large number of independent practices and tools, but there is no clear roadmap or technology-related plans, this investment will be unplanned and unwise.

Lack of process automation. In most software development and delivery teams, there are still too many manual steps and processes. Consider weekly status reports, which are key to cross-sectoral decision-making and organizational hubs. Making these reports requires a lot of emails, registration calls, and the need to create spreadsheets that are neither accurate nor perfect. In fact, the improvement of manual steps due to repetitive tasks will be a significant indicator of automation of process implementation.