As you can see, having an ALM infrastructure in the clouds can further reduce the time spent by an agile team on tool support, because it reduces infrastructure and technology debt. The team only uses the amount of ALM tooling that it needs. Keep in mind that agile ALM in the clouds could be built by an external vendor or could be built or hosted internally within a company so that teams can take advantage of this common service and have more time to build customer value.
Summary
The marriage of ALM within a value chain and agile framework can be a powerful combination. This integrated framework strongly emphasizes customer value and validation, using iterative and incremental steps to continuously build, validate, and adapt. This ALM framework allows a product team to manage and trace customer value throughout the lifecycle. Additionally, having this agile ALM “in the clouds”—whether externally or internally through a service provider—allows the team to almost totally focus on building business value. If your organization has adopted agile and you are looking at building your ALM framework, consider an infrastructure and tooling that will help you establish and build customer value throughout the lifecycle.
See Part 1 of this two-part series at Agile ALM for Delivering Customer Value: Getting Started
Reference
Infrastructure—On-premises or in the Clouds, by Mario E. Moreira in the November 2009 edition of the “Agile Journal.”
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About the author
Mario Moreira is a Columnist for the CM Journal, a writer for the Agile Journal, an Author, an Agile and CM expert for CA, and has worked in the CM field since 1986 and in the Agile field since 1998. He has experience with numerous CM technologies and processes and has implemented CM on over 150 applications/products, which include establishing global SCM infrastructures. He is a certified ScrumMaster in the Agile arena having implemented Scrum and XP practices. He holds an MA in Mass Communication with an emphasis on communication technologies. Mario also brings years of Project Management, Software Quality Assurance, Requirement Management, facilitation, and team building skills and experience. Mario is the author of a new book entitled “Adapting Configuration Management for Agile Teams” (via Wiley Publishing). It provides an Agile Primer and a CM Primer, and how to adapt CM practices for Agile Teams. Mario is also the author of the CM book entitled, “Software Configuration Management Implementation Roadmap.” It includes step-by-step guidance for implementing SCM at the organization, application, and project level with numerous examples. Also consider visiting Mario’s blog on CM for Agile and Agile adoption at http://cmforagile.blogspot.com/ . You may reach Mario by email at Mario.Moreira@cmcrossroads.com.
