Practices: Optimize the Software Lifecycle

Optimize the Software Lifecycle: Better, Faster, Cheaper

Enterprise software is reaching a compelling turning point. As companies attempt to become more agile to meet customer needs, they see the delivery of new IT capabilities as a key differentiator. That hasn't changed. What has changed is the level of pressure brought on by the need to integrate smaller, distributed development teams and multiple technologies, while still delivering high service levels in today's composite application environments.

With each release cycle, more software components are being incorporated due to newer approaches including SOA, BPM, SaaS and Cloud-based services.

Why Software Agility has created a Turning Point

While individual release cycles are indeed becoming shorter and more agile, the rate of change and overall complexity of the software lifecycle has increased. Software development can no longer be supported with physical hardware, virtual machines and manual testing. This has made enterprise software delivery:

• Lower Quality: Increased complexity creates poor application reliability and failures in production
• Slower: Project deadlines are either being missed, or less functionality is being delivered in each release
• Costlier: The Infrastructure costs of supporting environments for development and manual testing labor costs are becoming prohibitive

The above challenges are inevitable. Software is no longer created on an island, where a single team has the authority or the time to code a complete application, or define their own monolithic environment. Behind the user interface of the application, there can be any number of components owned by other teams and independent partners and vendors that are not under your direct control. This has forced costs and project timelines to increase, while end user quality suffers.

Better, Faster, Cheaper Enterprise Software with LISA

So how can we reverse this trend and actually realize the promise of Agile software delivery - and make software Better, Faster and Cheaper?

• Better: Increase quality and performance, and "Shift Testing Left" through automated testing and defect resolution earlier in development with LISA's automated Testing. continuous Validation and Pathfinder capabilities.
• Faster: Eliminate the constraints of unavailable or incomplete systems and services by capturing and simulating their behavior, data, and performance characteristics, so they are available for use anytime with Service Virtualization, and dev and test teams can work in parallel.
• Cheaper: Reduce development and test lab environment costs using virtual services in elastic, on-demand DevTest Cloud environments that can be deployed instantly at a fraction of the usual cost.

ITKO's LISA solutions enable your development and test teams to realize higher quality and faster software delivery at a lower total cost. ROI on these improvements can be realized rapidly. Real customer results include:

• Better: A Government Agency reported automated test coverage levels over 90%, a 66% reduction in test labor costs and a renewed focus on new functionality.
• Faster: A leading Telco moved from a 6-month software integration cycle to a monthly release process..
• Cheaper: A Top 5 Financial Institution saved $30M in infrastructure costs in its first year by virtualizing shared dev and test labs.