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IT Metrics - The IT Development Life Cycle decision


One of the most complex decisions any IT department has to take is to decide which is the model that fits the best into our organization regarding the IT Development Life Cycle methodology

This decision is a key innovation element when confronted with the need to increase E2E development efficiency regarding business needs and time to market. Most business are recently changing the paradigm of how they manage IT requirements as they need a significant change on the way they deliver to their own customers. This is mainly due to the fact that to the light of the current economic downturn the final consumers are challenging our companies to improve the services provided to them, whether those are financial services, consumer services or any other added value product we have been offering to the market.

There are tons of documentation and support information regarding this matter, which will help us on the decision making process. As you all know this is not a new debate for the IT communities, but now to the contrary to what has happened in the past decade, we are confronted with a complete different challenges, most of them resulting from the new business trends and related IT requirements.

As such to decide whether a Traditional Sequential development method is more aligned with your new IT requirements than the Agile one is something will require some deep thought from you and your development team leads as it is not an easy move, neither for your teams nor for the business key users in charge of the final application deployment.

Lately we have seen different technical articles and debates proposing the Agile methodology based on collaborative nature approach for the organisations where there is a substantial number of complex business requests changing along the way due to their own business nature and market conditions.

 















Scrum has been referred as a preferred agile project management for software development, basically because is based in two main added value premises; first is because its simplicity (process, practices, artifacts and rules) and second due to the fact that it allow multiple incremental functionalities starting from a process skeleton, although requiring a close and multiple team interactions all along the way. This feature make necessary that the different teams become managers and final responsible for their own deliverables, deciding by their own which is the best solution to be applied for each and every development piece of the project.

This method compared with the heavy weigh one based on the Sequential development cycle such Waterfall require a different mindset and team organization. For example many organizations are currently using the V-Model which is considered as an extension of the Waterfall model by itself. These companies have understood that this model is more secure and reliable than any other, specially because it conceptually requires that before you can start one specific SDLC phase you have first to close the previous one (in agreement between the different process stakeholders).   




Not going more deep on this debate I believe that is becoming clear for everyone that this decision has to be taken not only to the light of the IT reality we have in our own organizations, but also after a thorough analysis about which are the new business challenges we have to fulfill. In my opinion and based on more than 20 years of professional experiences, this decision will be more dependent on the level of business model maturity, business time to market, type of products/services, etc. than on a pure IT related matter.

Having said that it is also important to remember that there is always the possibility to implement a combined SDLC model, taking the best from each of these two groups of methodologies and refining them along the way within our organizations. The same way that we all know that there are not two identical business companies in the market, it is also true that there is not a single solution for the IT dilemma managing business requirements. It is our call to find the one that fits the best and then fine-tune it through innovation and process improvement to the point we reach the best possible results.

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