The five imperatives for effective application lifecycle management are summarized as follows:
In-Context Collaboration frees your mobile development team to focus on work that is more creative. Collaboration increases the value of your mobile app by delivering on the vision of stakeholders. By collaborating with stakeholders on requirements, designs, work items, test cases, and running software, you can understand expectations. You can also develop a collective intelligence of what your app is expected to provide.
In-Context Collaboration is the ability to collaborate, in real time, on projects in the context of the work that is done. Other teams might rely on email, spreadsheets, or loosely integrated tools as their collaboration infrastructure. These integration types might seem like the most cost-effective solutions, but they often result in lower productivity from individual team members. Members spend more time to search for and send emails, updating status spreadsheets, and cutting and pasting data across tools.
With the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution, development team capture discussions and chats in the context of the work that is being done. This collaboration builds a collective intelligence of technical and business decisions. Empowering your mobile team to collaborate on and review software development artifacts enables feedback early and often, aligning delivery with the vision of the stakeholder. This collaboration is critical for mobile apps where the development cycle is short and late changes are costly, however small. By providing a single source of truth that is hosted in a shared repository, team members collaborate effectively around the globe. Technical and non-technical team members can enter feedback in comments or annotations. They can build collective intelligence. Information immediately accessible to all team members makes everyone more effective, which is critical in a short development lifecycle.
Real-time Planning is linked to your project execution. Without this key criteria (for example, maintaining mobile project plans in a Microsoft project file outside of your ALM environment), plans inevitably get stale and inaccurate. This consequence is especially true in the fast pace of mobile development. Using the capabilities of the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution, you can integrate your planning with execution. These capabilities enable your team to manage project resources easily, onboard new team members and react nimbly to changes introduced by stakeholders.
You can ensure that your entire team understands the overall scope of the project by having a single plan that spans requirements, development, and testing. With planning integrated with execution, the entire team understands the true project status and is able to adjust quickly. Everyone can participate in keeping the plan current and accurate. This collaboration enables the team to respond quickly to the unexpected and keep the team on schedule. They can therefore deliver the mobile app on time and avoid unnecessary and costly delays. For example, with Rational Team Concert™, team members can react quickly to feedback from early users of your mobile app. Based on that feedback, they can prioritize accordingly and select the next story to implement from the backlog.
Lifecycle Traceability is the ability to provide forward and backwards visibility across your mobile project lifecycle. With the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution, you can identify with confidence that the mobile app you are delivering includes a specific requirement. Further, you can be sure that it was developed with a specified process, associated with a specific software build, and validated by a specific set of test cases and test case results. Anything less than that would mean that you really do not know what you are delivering, and whether the deliverable meets quality or regulatory compliance requirements.
You can easily establish relationships between software artifacts, and identify and close artifact gaps, to ensure coverage across disciplines. Quickly get visibility into the completeness of planned items by inspecting all related artifacts. With easy access to related artifacts, everyone on your mobile development team shares the same view to avoid miscommunication and confusion, which slows down development. Deliver transparency which enables everyone to make fully informed decisions-based business priorities. All this traceability is another way to ensure that the app you deliver is of high quality and that it meets stakeholder needs. As an example, in Rational Team Concert, you can view a new story that is being implemented, and mouse-hover the associated test case to check whether the status is pass or fail.
You rely on your ALM environment to capture metrics automatically and behind the scenes, minimizing administrative work. Next, you have to surface those metrics on demand, at the right level of detail for every stakeholder, from executive to practitioner. Without this correlated and "right sized" intelligence, managers spend most of their time asking for information from their teams. By using the customizable dashboards and reporting in the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution, project leaders can spend less time to search for data. They can also spend more time to actively lead and coach teams, and influence project outcomes positively. Studies show that projects with strong measurement practices are much more likely to complete on time, a critical priority for mobile development projects.
Be better able to predict the success of your mobile project by enabling fact-based decision making (to communicate status, monitor progress, diagnose problems, identify corrective actions). Steer your projects and programs to deliver on-time, and apply Business Intelligence techniques to your mobile app development. For example, gain insight into your mobile project using Team Connection queries and dashboards to monitor progress on stories and status of builds.
Continuous improvement in development is critical to being able to quickly produce the high quality mobile apps your business needs, in an environment of resource and financial pressures. Use the capabilities in the IBM Mobile Development Lifecycle Solution to improve your mobile app delivery through the ongoing adoption of best practices and automation to reduce manual, non-creative, and error prone tasks such as documentation, metric collection, progress reporting, audit preparation, and regression testing.
You can promote incremental improvement of your project when needed, and enable breakthrough improvement by capturing best practices and reusing them across teams. This allows everyone to participate with easy to adopt best practices.
Common team issues include infrequent integration builds and poor communication of when changes are in a build, resulting in integration issues not being found until late in the development cycle, which is when they cost more to fix. This situation is not acceptable in fast-paced mobile app development. Another common challenge is automating deployment of apps to multiple private and public app stores which have unique processes and review policies. Improved build processes can address these mobile challenges using Rational Team Concert that is integrated with IBM Worklight builds, and the sample build scripts provided.