Portfolio Expert
Offshore Your Way to ALM
Selective offshoring can help to drive and fund effective application lifecycle processes for companies.
Is offshoring a menace to internal development or an opportunity?
Complex sourcing and distributed software development demand application lifecycle consistency. Whether you're dealing with offshoring, outsourcing, wildly dispersed internal groups or combinations of these and other staffing strategies, the issue is the same: IT development teams can't collaborate well without effective Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) processes and some degree of software tools automation.
Offshoring can be viewed as a competitive danger to internal IT departments. Yet there are key ways in which corporate commitment to offshoring can help to drive and fund more effective application lifecycle processes, organizational strategies and tools adoption. In fact, these efforts can help IT departments improve business coordination and make better use of supplementary, external resources.
With upfront activism, planning and input, internal IT can drive this ALM push rather than being driven by whatever tools, processes and organizational strategies are already employed by the potential outsourcer or offshore provider.
Better Requirements
It's challenging enough to communicate about requirements when IT staff is co-located, speaks the same
language, deals with the same business unit stakeholders and meets face to face on a semi-regular basis. Imagine how things go once you must cross time, distance, culture, language and corporate barriers. It's clear that the usual requirements discussions, which tend to be poorly run, ad hoc, and lacking in follow-up, will not get the job done -- especially for offshoring situations.
For acceptable results, you need consistent feedback loops, communication and data management for requirements gathering, and validation with on-site representatives. Otherwise, your new or customized applications will often fail to be relevant to the business. The opportunity here is for IT to make corporate investments in offshoring and help spur investment in more effective requirements gathering and other lifecycle process improvements.
Of course, distance and poorly coordinated distributed teams create a problem when it comes to managing software change. Deal with outsourced and offshored providers, and it gets even worse. Selective offshoring can act as a software configuration management (SCM) catalyst, prompting companies to adopt consistent change management processes, standardized tools and improved organizational approaches.
Quality Controls
And then there is testing, which plays a critical role in validating the work of far-flung developers when offshore and outsourced groups are involved. From functional alignment with business needs to security gaps, testing remains the last bastion of visibility into the quality of code produced by internal and external development teams.
One thing companies cannot afford to give up is strong oversight of external operations, and that's particularly true for testing. Giving the proverbial fox the keys to the hen house when it comes to quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) means that neither IT nor the business has independent, verifiable insight into what was produced by external resources. At a minimum, internal IT representatives should work closely with QA/QC staff to manage metrics and ascertain that service level agreements and key functional and performance needs are met. In this way, external sourcing enables investment in test automation and better practices -- as long as the business and IT work together to maintain high levels of control and representation.
Finally, there is the critical issue of portfolio management and prioritization in a diversified development operation. How do you decide which resources go to which projects? What is the impact of shifting your best staff in one area to another initiative to respond to competitive pressure? These kinds of decisions are facilitated by organizational and governance strategies, and appropriate automated tools -- appropriate to the level of need and maturity of the organization. Overkill here can truly "kill" acceptance and adoption -- and as service-oriented architecture emerges, effective decision-making and prioritization across the IT and business become key.
Next time word hits the cubicles that corporate commitment to outsourcing and offshoring is increasing, do your best to make sure that investments are allocated at appropriate levels of ALM for requirements, SCM, testing, modeling, methodology, process and, as possible, IT portfolio management. Since you will be one of the managed resources, laying out the framework for quality collaboration and software creation across borders and boundaries gives a basis for success at coordination. Take this as a chance to drive ALM and invest in organizational, process and tools strategies.
About the Author
Melinda-Carol Ballou is program director for IDC's Application Life-Cycle Management research, where she focuses on software life-cycle process configuration and management, software quality and IT governance software. Prior to joining IDC, she ran Ballou IT Strategies, an independent consulting company specializing in PPM and ALM, and served as senior program director at META Group.