Solving Today’s Application Lifecycle Management Challenges Step by Step

Agile or not, every stakeholder wants visibility into his or her application development projects underway. Some questions and challenges are shared among most organizations. Regardless of which project you work on, where you work, or what methodologies you adopt, you have most likely asked yourself many questions like these at various stages of your software development process:

1. Will the project be delivered on time?

2. Is the project ahead or behind?

3. Are teams and resources fully utilized?

4. Do I need more resources?

5. How good is the quality of systems in development?

6. What is the rate of defects?

7. What is the cause of defects?

8. How critical are these defects?

9. How can I reduce the rate and significance of defects occurring in the system?

10. How much time is being spent on maintenance versus building new features?

11. Is the team working on highest priority requirements?

12. Are we able to distinguish the highest priority requirements?

13. Are issues, concerns, and blocking items visible and escalated on time?

14. Have we identified risks? Do we have an adequate plan to manage them?

15. Is the team motivated?

16. Is the team committed?

17. Is some team member falling behind, blocked, and in need of help?

18. How can I balance the workload instead of having to deal with peaks and valleys?

19. How do I align external teams and maintain transparency?

20.  Am I spending money on right priorities with best long-term returns?

21. What is the customer response to what we are building? Are we delivering value?

The list of questions can go on and on. And even though such questions and challenges are well known, it is surprisingly difficult to get clear answers and good solutions that would increase your level of confidence in your application development work.

In the upcoming posts, we will take these very questions one by one and start paving the road to answers and solutions. We will go over processes, tools, people issues and best practices.

To make these discussions most relevant to your current needs, we invite your comments and contributions – what application development challenges and questions are bothering you today?