Agile Methodology for Quick and Successful Project Completion

To ensure a successful project completion and cut down the possibility of a project failure, many software development teams are continually looking for ways to enhance both the process and technology of software development life cycle.

With no software system being simple enough to complete a development that can be scripted from beginning to end in a linear fashion, there are plenty that are looking at a shift in the market towards the Agile ALM. Agile and ALM, once two distinct market segments, are now beginning to consolidate. As a result we now have what is called Agile ALM platforms. Although both the ALM and Agile communities concentrate on enhancing the current state of software development, the agile methodology uses the technology point of view to approach a challenge while agile looks at improving the process itself. 

The mutual goals and synergies of ALM and Agile are resulting in a number of Agile ALM vendors in the market. Scrum, the most popular implementation of the agile movement, has seen exponential growth in the past and teams using Scrum enjoy the advantage of accelerated product innovation, and minimal project rework. The best thing about Agile is that it preserves the interests of all stakeholders in a project, be it the client, project manager, development team or testing team. Agile promotes transparency and visibility, both of which are crucial aspects for the success of any project. To ensure successful project completion it is essential for your agile solution to maintain artifacts, entities and objects as well as projects, releases, sprints, product backlogs, daily scrum meetings, test cases, issues/changes. It is consequently important for an agile solution to be capable of dealing with several project releases, encapsulating all primary meeting phases, engage in optimized traceability relations and combine visual matters, process designs and handle implementations. 

Ideally effective application lifecycle management solutions should not require too much product support and maintenance, and be able to selectively import from various sources including previous projects. Managing backlogs and entities is an important step since these backlog items are assigned to different users independent of their locations, therefore agile solutions should allow for user access from anywhere anytime. It must also offer best solution that can allow users and project members to enter various Backlogs as Issues/ defects/ change and enhancement requests. It must also allow for routing of these items through suitable workflows based on the backlog types.

Partner with the right service-provider to ensure best process management and successful project completion.

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Why Software Change Management Solution is Important?

Software change management is an important discipline for an IT enterprise. In today's modern day IT enterprises, software automates a wide selection of business procedures. Software changes are in effect to the alterations made to the business processes. For instance, the manner in which an insurance agency offers life insurance policy quotes is encoded in its quote engine. Any unplanned alterations in the quote would also lead to unplanned changes in the quote types that the firm offers. Therefore, software changes need a careful management exactly the way a business process change does, as both are interrelated. 

 

Without a systematic change management process, IT organizations lack a complete understanding of the way the software running in production automates their business process. This comprises managing changes in software development, production and to related artifacts such as models, requirements and test cases. This also comprises the management of both individual changes as well as the coordination of dependant changes.

 

Furthermore, the new age development language techniques and tools are placed in IT enterprises in a manner to cater to the business requirements for speed by significantly increasing the productivity of the organization development. However, the increased productivity also tempts IT shops to roll software into production without applying any apt controls. This can result in wastage of more money than what got saved when the productivity increased. Maximized adoption of componentized software infrastructure is one of the crucial technical drives for an improved change management.

 

Today solution providers specializing in agile methodology have introduced advanced change management solutions that offer the following benefits:

 

· Simple to use - Users can use it with very less training.

 

· Has a single repository for application lifecycle entities - This means entities like Use cases, Requirement management, Change items, Test cases, Issues, Change packages and others are available in one repository. This effortlessly integrates change with other entities and leads to an improved cross-entity visibility.

 

· Offers a two-way requirements traceability association - End users can create or update Change package as they enter the change items. They can view the Change package status from Change items and can also manage Change items from Change package.

 

· Offers a process driven methodology - The solution enables enterprises to define their own change management procedures. As soon as the process is defined the system guides the specified resources for conducting the appropriate functions.

 

Furthermore, advanced change management solutions tracks and manages the software changes optimally with reactive and proactive impact analysis all through the software development life cycle. Automated change management process can be deployed and enforced for minimizing the chances of things going beyond hands to manage.

 

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Role of Change Management in Automated Business Process

The frequency of technological innovations has paved way for the customers to demand more from the service providers and IT enterprise. The business world with its cut-throat competition further expects that the enterprises try to meet the customer's ever-changing requirements which means that enterprises need to either bring in the necessary upgrading in the IT infrastructure or need to go in for a complete change over of the present IT landscape. The need for changes in the IT infrastructure may also arise in response to legislative changes, need for improved efficiency and effectiveness or enable business initiatives.

 

Change management being an IT service management discipline, the objective is to ensure that standardized methods and procedures are used for efficiently handling the impact of related incidents due to changes. In the technology enabled business world, with IT as a major controller of all the activities, change management is inevitable. Today's corporate environment is surrounded by digital data traversing through widely networked workstations across geographically distant offices. What makes the entire day-to-day operation successful in such an environment is the software applications that are used to automate the business process.

 

For an in-depth understanding of how software operation can automate the business process, enterprises need a proper software change management process in place. This will include a change management in software development, requirement management and test cases. However, changes to software requirements that are part and parcel of the application lifecycle can be predicted, any unidentified and unaddressed change will have catastrophic impact on the application releases. Leading service providers of agile methodology have developed innovative and robust change management solutions that can help enterprises effectively meet these challenges. and help them track the changes.

 

Change Management mainly consists of two parts - Change Items and Change Package. The automated change management process offers enterprises a number of advantages such as:

• Application lifecycle entities such as requirements, Test Cases, Change Items, Change Packages, etc. are available in a single repository.
• Every entity seamlessly integrates changes with other entities and results in a better cross-entity visibility
• Change items and packages can be linked on basis of similar functionality, features and groups and this aids in the effective implementation of change items.

The new age change management solutions besides catering to the present day organizational requirements are also user friendly. It also 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

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