Software production management could boost productivity

Organizations could save as much as $2 million and increase productivity by as much as 15 times through use of "software production management," tools, according to an industry analyst who has just published a report on the issue.

Software production management emphasizes the acceleration, analysis, and automation of the software build, test, and deployment process, said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke, which released a report this month entitled, "Market Snapshot: Software Production Management."

The report was based on a survey of Fortune 500 companies, enterprise IT organizations, and ISVs. Lanowitz would not say who funded the study but said questions used were not product- or brand-specific.

Software production management is becoming important as applications get more complex and development houses are worried about delivering high-quality software, Lanowitz said. Complexity is building because of new requirements and more demands.

"With respect to software production management, [organizations are] really concerned about being able to more effectively, more efficiently manage the build [process]," Lanowitz. This process must be integrated with other parts of the application lifecycle, such as testing, she said.

To boost the build process, builds should be done on a more frequent basis to weed out defects earlier, Lanowitz said. Voke also is recommending use of software production management tools, such as IBM Rational Build Forge, Electric Cloud ElectricCommander, Borland Gauntlet, or open-source products like CruiseControl.

"Once [organizations] started using the software production management tools, what they found was that their broken builds disappeared," she said.

Through software production management, savings of as much as $1 million to $2 million were cited by 40 percent of survey participants. Savings occurred through decreased wait time for builds, faster time to market, and eliminating the development and maintenance of internally built tools for software production management.

Productivity increases of as much as 10 to 15 times were noted by 33 percent of respondents.

Electric Cloud's ElectricAccelerator product, for example, has helped Symantec reduce the time it takes to get a software build over to quality assurance personnel, said Maria Morris, senior director of software quality assurance at Symantec.

"It's really important for us," because Symantec must produce as many builds as it can to get critical fixes to quality assurance staff as often as possible, she said.

While software production management plays into the theme of agile development, which involves short, regular releases of software during development process, it is not limited to agile.

The report also covers the concept of "Application Lifecycle 2.0." This concept is about organizations being able to communicate and collaborate better with partners and using processes, technology and application lifecycle technologies such as virtualization, software production management, and source code analysis. With virtualization, software development houses use virtual lab automation, in which a production environment is set up. The environment is at a neutral state for testing.