Agile SCM January 2007 - Looking Back to Move Forward

Platform.

Integration of CM with ITIL is the new "Enterprise CM"

More and more SCM services departments are having to deal with many of the same issues of IT (and even being lumped together with IT) as they support not just the functions for CM, but also provide deployment, training and support for the corresponding ALM tools, repositories and servers. The integrated CMDB is also useful for both traceabilty and accounting/accountability (think Sarbanes-Oxley).

Also, more and more folks are needing to extend CM into their deployment sites at their customer's operations to help them handle field-issues and upgrades, even monitoring, service-tracking/licensing/monitoring and possibly some CRM functions.

So it makes sense that CM professionals who need to deploy, develop and support "the whole shmeer" are having to learn and understand CM, ALM and ITIL. Word has it that integration of CMMI with ITIL is coming soon.

SOA, BPM and TCO are emerging priorities on the horizon

There wasn't quite as much mention about these, but it seems clear that they will be growing more important this year. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) will be important to the extent that TeamSystem and ALF are important, and some vendors are already using SOA-based integration for the tools within their own suites.

As the integrations between ALM tools and with the IDE become more seamless, Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow will become a bigger concern as folks try to more readily define and automate their processes, particularly for deployment to multiple distributed sites.

 

And Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is becoming an increasingly more prevalent factor in selection of CM/ALM tools. The spiffy features and functionality are nice, but just as much weight (if not more) is being given to business issues of global licensing and upgrade/support, administration/maintenance, along with total cost of ownership.

I would say that all of the above are still "spot on" and we can expect to see more of the same this year - with one notable exception ...

ALF and Corona? or Open-Sourced Jazz?
While there has been activity on the websites for the ALF and Corona projects, we havent been hearing so much about them in the media outside of Eclipse-centric conferences, and press-release announcements from yet another vendor with an Eclipse "compatible" release of their software. While this certainly doesn't shatter the prediction, there has been more attention (perhaps due to more marketing?) about the upcoming ALM collaboration framework from IBM Rational called " Jazz." Based on the RDSC 2006 Day 2 Keynote presentation (and also at JavaOne),

Jazz is touted as the next generation of the Eclipse platform and the team based software development platform. Rational will of course provide a tool-set to go with it, but says it plans to release the overall framework (and code/APIs) under Open-Source. The claim is that the result is an ALM collaboration architecture which is inherently scalable to provide true support for geographicall dispersed development projects in a true collaborative fashion. Well known names from Rational have been presenting Jazz at various conferences throughout 2006 and generating lots of "buzz," as evidenced by articles and blogs like the following:

• IBM is Revamping Rational 
• IBM Jazzes Collaboration 
• JavaOne 2006: Keynote on Agile Eclipse, Transparency, Honest, and Retrospective 
• Rational Jazz Soon to Eat More of It's Own Dog-food: Transparency 
• Jazz is the news 
• IBM Jazzing up Rational Offerings, from InfoWorld 
• IBM to employ open-source development style for tools, from eWeek 
• Big Jazz News on IBM developerWorks blogs 
• Agile Requirements Engineering in the Jazz Collaborative Development Environment , from Rutgers 2006 Software Engineering day
• Hot Jazz vs. Cold Beans