Service Oriented Application Life cycle Management -A reference framework for ALM services

Motivation The goal of this research project is to investigate the possibilities (advantages and disadvantages) of using a service oriented approach for application life cycle management (ALM). ALM is the set of processes and tools with which the application portfolio is kept up to date. In the current situation the IT processes which make this possible, are frequently entangled with each other and the business organisation. This entanglement makes it hard to break the IT organisation down into smaller pieces. As IT is often not a core activity of an organisation, it is a candidate for outsourcing. When parts of the IT organisation are outsourced they are detached from the rest of the IT organisation, so breaking the entanglement is necessary. The result of breaking the entanglement is that the information cannot flow as it normally does. New standards have to be applied on how information should flow when a process is outsourced. By (re-)defining the parts or services the of IT organisation, this problem can be resolved. The assumption is that a service approach to ALM can deliver an important contribution to solving the outsourcing problems by reducing the entanglement of the IT processes. Before the advantages of service oriented ALM (SO-ALM) can be tested, a framework has to be developed which consists of ALM organised around service: the SO-ALM framework. Meta-model The SO-ALM framework is composed of ALM services. These services are a wrapper around a collection of processes which act as a black box. How IT processes are organised is already known and the SO-ALM framework does not try to reinvent these, only to present them in another way. Existing process frameworks like ASL, ITIL and OpenUP are used as input for the processes. Each ALM service has a number of functions. The ALM service functions define the interaction; they are the interfaces of the ALM services: what asset is exchanged when. Functions are separated into four different function types for clarification: Contract functions - to make agreements about the usage of a service; Do functions - give an ALM service assignments to do something, initiate action; Deliver functions - retrieve products which are the result from actions initiated by do functions; Inform about functions - deliver management information / statistics about an ALM service. The goal is to measure the ALM service to verify it performs to the made agreements. iii ALM service creation and documentation The ALM services are created based upon criteria and knowledge of experts. A workshop and interviews have been used to get the knowledge of experts. A wiki is used to document the ALM services. The wiki implements the meta-model. The advantage of using a wiki opposed to a normal document is that, it always represents the latest version and allows everyone to make contributions in an easy way while creating an audit trail in case reverts are necessary. The wiki can be found online by the URL of: www.so-alm.nl/wiki/. Results The SO-ALM concept and the SO-ALM framework have been validated by using a workshop, interviews and an online survey. The results of this validation can be summarised as followed: The SO-ALM framework can lead to easier switching of suppliers; The SO-ALM framework will probably not lead to an increase in service quality; It is more likely that prices will drop due to competition, opposed to an increase in service quality; The SO-ALM framework might help to keep a better overview of the entire IT organisation by making the IT organisation more transparent; Moving towards a service organisation requires more than a framework with ALM services, do not forget the changes in IT governance; Maintaining the SO-ALM framework could be done best by an open source organisation. We think that an open source framework attracts more users and improves faster; More standardisation is better; the SO-ALM framework could be used to achieve this. Standardisation leads to lower cost and higher supplier flexibility; The meta-model is a good model but it needs careful explanation, people do not always get it the first time; The SO-ALM framework delivers a complete set of ALM service; Creating uniform names for ALM functions is difficult and should involve multiple review rounds by multiple experts; Some ALM services are candidates for outsourcing, like development, others are best kept in-house, like project & program management; Recommendations Further development and testing of the framework in real life situations; Investigate the risks/negative aspects of moving towards a service oriented organisation; Standardise on metrics and measure the ALM service performance