The Way To Effective IT Change Management

The software change management process is essential for every IT company. For progressive IT companies, software helps to automate a wide selection of business procedures. Any change that is made to the software is going to bring changes in the entire business process. For example, the manner in which an insurance company provides quotes for life insurance policies is efficiently encoded in the quote engine. Any involuntary changes to this quote might result in an unplanned modification to the type of quotes that a life insurance agency provides. Therefore, it is crucial that software changes are carefully monitored.

Why Change Management is important?

Without a proper software change management process in place IT companies will lack an in-depth understanding of the way software operation of production can automate business processes. This comprises effective change management to the software in production, development and any other alterations that are associated with artifacts such as requirement managements, test cases and so on.

Most decision makers and business entrepreneurs when interviewed have put emphasis on the benefits of software change management. The modern day business scenario has made entrepreneurs and business houses believe that they require this process for fulfilling increased demands from clients and end users.

Software needs can be predicted across the application life cycle. Hence, any unidentified alteration can make the application releases witness hassles and unfavorable circumstances. To be able to manage these situations efficiently, eminent service providers specializing in agile methodology have come up with innovative change management solutions that assists in managing and tracking changes appropriately.

Furthermore, the changes are also managed through a reactive impact analysis across the software development life cycle. Effective automated change management programs can be implemented for bringing down the scopes of risk consequences. The modern day change management solutions have been set up in a way that caters to the present day needs and are user friendly. Simultaneously, it acts as a repository for application life cycle modifications and efficiently links the same type of change items to change packages, results in a two-way requirements traceability matrix and functions in a process driven manner.

In this ever changing aggressive market scenario, with mergers and acquisitions increased proximity to customer via Web 2.0 technologies and social computing creates a great pressure for IT to provide software change management effectively and quickly.

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Software Development Life cycle Solutions Collaborating Teams

Business enterprises in their attempt to stand fast in the face of aggressive competition make use of technology and its innovations. As customers also become aware of new technological development, there arises a demand for various applications.  Since businesses are customer centric, the changing demands from the customers paves way for enterprises also  looking forward to further  development of new software applications. However, since every software has a lifecycle to cover, it is not possible to fast pace the development process. Hence to meet the ever changing demands of the customers, enterprises also look towards outsourcing of the software’s from the experts.

Software development life cycle depicts the various stages and logical steps involved in creating, altering or customizing the set of programs so as to meet the requirements of the organization. By integrating people, process and technology   it helps to reduce complexities and enhance the productivity levels in the organization. The complexities involved in the software development process starts from the initiation phase to analysis, design, implementation, maintenance and disposal. Leading service providers and IT giants have worked out SDLC solutions that will provide a structured process for all phases of software development. Such attempts will ensure that the organizations strategic goals met.

Irrespective of the development process following a traditional or waterfall or agile methodology, the software development lifecycle solutions that provide a flexible workflow and configurable applications can be customized for every organization. The lifecycle process of the application with various developmental phases includes tools for the same. Thus the SDLC has tools that are needed for activities such as requirements management, test management, risk management and management of the IT project as a whole. However, the configuration management and build management functions of the application lifecycle management are carried out with the help of third party tools integrated through the service integration bus adaptors.

However, SDLC being a web based solution, information exchange and team collaborations are through the web and corporate networks. The requirements management tool that can be optimized for each project takes data with the help of the requirements traceability matrix and multiple input capturing methods. Further, this provides enterprises a global platform for tracing implementations, administrative and configuration process irrespective of the location.

In today's global environment with development teams spread across geographical boundaries and offshore locations, such software development lifecycle  solutions from leading service providers  ensures delivery of high quality software. The proven framework with uniform methods, designs and operations results in  better team collaborations, effective planning and control with increased productivity.

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Increasing Productivity with The Right ALM Solution

There is a major change in the software design, development and delivery, primarily due to the focus on business agility. Putting together a consistent ecosystem while managing larger diversity in teams, many organizations are trying to balance various competing requirements like delivering projects on schedule while standardizing processes. With the implementation of agile methodology, there is a drop in the total cost of ownership in addition to a boost in the quality with a reduction in time to market.

 

Allowing the teams in the organization to share the best practices for development and deployment, the adopting Application Lifecycle Management solutions also help increase productivity. Sound ALM solutions  permit developers to concentrate on business requirements and maintain unfailing quality, and makes certain that the needs and the expectations created for all end-users are successfully met. Even as ALM reorganizes development, It brings about tremendous pace to the whole process, while also decreasing the time taken to develop the software and bring it to market. It also gets the most out of your investment in labor and technology as it ensures that each step in the development process and is accomplished as efficiently as possible.

 

The most important benefit of an ALM solution is coordinating the people, processes, information, and tools involved in a project to deliver innovation to your stakeholders. It brings about better team collaboration and communication. With a shared, single, web-based, and global collaborative platform, errors can be prevented as distributed teams work with the same specifications.  Anyone with the appropriate permission can make changes with    automatic notifications sent out to other team members. It also helps manage regulatory compliance automatically with complete backwards and forwards traceability.

 

By adopting a suitable integrated Application Lifecycle Management solution, an organization can experience a considerable increase in savings in a project cost. It has been estimated that a six month advantage in a product release can result in an eighteen month advantage in revenue generation. An efficient ALM solution must allow integrations with third party tools used on premise by the users.  

 

Invest in a solution that provides the business benefits of the cloud such as elasticity, quick time to value and subscription-based licensing. The Software as a Service SaaS  model, with its flexibility and built-in scalability, will be able to tackle any challenges that may arise in software development. Eliminate the need for complex and costly tool integrations with a  cost-effective, flexible and user-friendly ALM  integration.

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Agile Methodology – Best in a Distributed Development Environment

To cut down the possibility of a project failure, software development teams continually look for ways to enhance both the process and technology of software development. Most software systems aren’t simple to just have a complete development that can be drafted from beginning to end, and this is why many are shifting towards agile methodologies. To ensure smooth operations and efficient performances, enterprises need agility to be capable of addressing the risks and concerns effectively. Having the ability to respond efficiently to the eve revolving requirements, the agile methodology provides immense benefits to the enterprise.

 Agile methodologies help manage application development distributed among various teams in a quick and efficient manner. There are a number of conventional project teams that run into trouble when they define all of the requirements up front. And among the different phases of software development life cycle, it is the requirement management phase that demands greater collaboration due to the involvement of many distributed stakeholders in creating, reviewing and approving requirements. Adopting the right agile solution transports various helpful ideas and strategies to software development life cycle.

 An agile solution can be used to implement various tools necessary in a distributed development scenario. The main benefit of today's Agile development methodologies such as Scrum or XP is the promise of delivering working software in a shorter period of time and the value derived from having the flexibility to adjust which features need to be implemented for the next iteration or release.

 Look for a good agile solution that provides the essential techniques for managing tools. An efficient agile solution must offer best change management solutions that can allow users and project members to enter various Backlogs as Issues, defects, change and enhancement requests. Ensure that the agile solution that you choose allows for routing of these items through suitable workflows based on the backlog types. It must also support planning for best traceability view by which users can get a comprehensive visibility to all the artifacts that are linked to one another which eventually would facilitate in either tracing forward or backward starting from any particular artifact.

 As agile methodologies promote a project management process that encourage stakeholder involvement, feedback, objective metrics and effective controls, it is important to invest in a solution that ensures that enable product owners to align a product to real user needs and adapt the development process.

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