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June 1, 2009
what total lifecycle management really means
What are the differences between your production and development systems? Your production system usually has more computing power. Probably has a naming convention that indicates it is production rather than development. And maybe tighter security. But real differences? None at all.
Think about it for a second. Production and development are implied concepts on every system on the planet. Management by permission, if even present, and naming conventions are all that are available in software lifecycle management, until now.
Imagine a system that on installation asked on what environment it is being installed. And if during installation you choose a production environment, the installation enforces a mutually exclusive nature and allows no other production environment to be executed from the software itself. Likewise if you indicate an install into development, system, integration, or a readiness environment, production applications are not allowed.
Let us take this a bit further and think about an application development system that simply will not allow changes in any environment except development because the system itself is lifecycle aware. That translates into a complete and traceable governance model with total accountability built into the system itself - not an afterthought or checklist that needs to be complete, but part of the development and execution management of the application.
What if this 'new' system took it a bit further and accommodated roles? In the old paradigm, project managers or architects have the authority to indicate when a project has completed development and is ready for migration to integration or production stages. Should they have permission to do so? Not likely, because this capability is outside the scope of their job functions. I have always advocated for a different role, a deployer, who may have no responsibility in development whatsoever but is completely responsible for migration to other environments.
Total lifecycle management dictates total governance and accountability in every single environment. With onshore and offshore models becoming more and more prevalent, with government regulations and theft of company data becoming common place, can you really afford to stick with what was once perceived as 'good enough?'
By the way, this subject is point #4 in our new 'top 10 reasons to choose expressor.' Click the link to read more.
- john russell, chief-scientist and co-founder
Posted by expressor software at June 1, 2009 1:15 PM
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