Leveraging Effective Application Discovery, Delivery, Change, and Quality Strategies for Digital Transformation

Transcription

1 White Paper Leveraging Effective Application Discovery, Delivery, Change, and Quality Strategies for Digital Transformation Sponsored by: IBM Melinda-Carol Ballou March 2018 IDC OPINION As part of digital transformation, companies must evolve business-critical applications and coordinate and leverage existing back-end systems of record (SoRs) on which around 70% of businesses are running their organizational and/or transactional data (according to IDC estimates). The challenges and costs of managing code changes with high quality demand strategies that incorporate SoRs and can dramatically increase efficiency. Developers and teams that are well versed in these legacy systems are aging out and retiring, and companies are reluctant to "touch" these critical systems due to lack of understanding, lack of insight, and breakage concerns. So, visibility into and management of these core systems as part of a DevOps life cycle are ever more pressing challenges. Companies are beginning to leverage new kinds of SoR approaches across disparate teams to enable views into, and analytics of, core existing legacy software systems. They are finding that taking advantage of code visibility benefits, coverage, and analytics can help them deliver applications and business value more quickly and efficiently. This is a key aspect to execution in dynamically competitive environments. Organizations also require effective agile process and organizational change coupled with appropriate automation and analytics to help cut testing and release times. With these approaches in place, organizations can focus on core applications and enable higher-quality software that leverages back-end SoRs. IDC believes that doing this in an evolutionary manner can enable organizations to create and augment existing applications with higher quality and efficient resource usage. This white paper discusses the evolution of organizations to this type of quality and change management analytics approach for monolithic enterprise applications and SoRs. It also examines some major pain points experienced by organizations that have not yet committed to an effective enterprise application and SoR analytics strategy. The document lays out the progress enabled by organizations that have successfully coordinated quality and change management for application "intelligence" to speed progress toward and to help enable digital transformation. IN THIS WHITE PAPER This white paper helps define and lay out application visualization and analytics. It discusses the consequences for software development, deployment, and digital transformation of leveraging these kinds of technologies for monolithic enterprise applications and SoRs. In concert with appropriate evaluation and adoption of automated tools that coordinate application visualization and analytics, March 2018, IDC #US

2 businesses should also shift to agile, iterative processes to enable collaboration across new and existing legacy systems and to help cut testing and delivery time. These strategies can also help form the basis for more effective application portfolio management supporting continuous delivery and digital transformation by applying iterative processes and tooling automation. SITUATION OVERVIEW The current approach to quality and change management for software as part of "modern" development tends to focus on fast, one-off creation of new applications. Yet access to core, real-time data and services in SoR mainframe environments is becoming increasingly critical for DevOps initiatives as a business backbone. These systems also require an evolutionary process transition to agile approaches along with effective automation. Analytics is key in competitive environments to enable users to look across platforms and coordinate across disparate software portfolios with visibility into applications and to better manage quality with high degrees of efficiency. Transforming software developers' ability to respond quickly to emerging business opportunities and modernizing processes to encompass emerging technologies (e.g., mobile, social, analytics, cloud, and IoT) generate competitive position. In addition, the ability to take back-end mainframe systems and provide visibility into existing software and into the impact of changes to software quality is key to achieving continuous delivery across multiple platforms for multispeed development teams. For organizations looking to evolve an effective DevOps strategy, therefore, it makes sense to leverage visibility into applications, the broad application portfolio (including mainframe SoRs), changes, impact analysis, quality, and software coverage as part of the process for creating effective, reliable software quickly. From a developer perspective, advanced visual analytics can help users discover code problems, cut testing times, minimize or eliminate redundant tests, and get visibility into operations (the "Ops" in DevOps) to find problems sooner and help understand the impact of code changes. This can occur via a combination of automation adoption and process change (including iterative, agile approaches). Moving to Agile Development Across Platforms IDC sees organizations pushing toward increased velocity of code deployment for all applications and improved coordination across teams. Instead of being siloed with some groups deploying daily or weekly and other back-end organizations releasing mainframe software on a 6- to 12-month cadence, companies are seeking to transition to agile deployment across groups and applications. DevOps and automation that includes code analytics and change management can help bring mainframe application teams together, evolving to an "end to end" iterative life-cycle approach to help achieve continuous delivery across teams and processes. Business users, analysts, developers, and operations staff must communicate effectively to prioritize evolution of back-end systems to sustain corporate initiatives and the mandate to make SoRs and broader mainframe applications available with appropriate levels of quality, change management, and compliance IDC #US

3 Businesses should make proactive decisions to evolve and invest in relevant systems and prioritize coherently (as opposed to deploying resources to applications with less relevance to business needs and reacting in an ad hoc manner) to advance execution and efficient use of testing and quality resources. Effective coordination between change and quality portfolio management can result in excellent leverage of back-end software, improved quality control, focused application performance, and strong prioritization of IT resources for iterative development and deployment of monolithic business applications, SoRs, and other applications. Increasingly, businesses must be able to manage quality well while responding to the exploding application content they must deliver while containing high costs in a dynamic and volatile worldwide economy. Overcoming Obstacles to Agile Adoption in Monolithic Application Environments and Sample Automation Functionality The most persistent barriers to successful adoption of agile approaches are cultural the inability of companies to change existing organizational structures and processes to incorporate iterative, agile approaches to development in mainframe (and other) environments. Human beings are wired for consistency rather than change. Executives must avidly and persistently commit to organizational change, coupled with targeted grassroots support from teams that are able to evangelize an agile transition within mainframe environments. These SoR organizations tend to be resistant and conservative (in part due to their concern about protecting the production data on which the success of the organization depends). Laying the groundwork for a secure SoR/quality and change management life cycle within the enterprise is a key link between development and deployment. Organizations must understand DevOps phases and define and discuss necessary analysis of functional capabilities to be able to incrementally transition their staff. Teams managing back-end mainframe systems then have the basis to transition to effective application analytics, change, and quality management to help enable digital transformation initiatives. Bridging these challenges for successful, early, and agile quality and change management within the enterprise can create a link between business stakeholders and back-end systems developers. It can be useful (as part of that process) to address the following sample questions to help unify teams and strengthen collaboration across groups: Where is the organization currently at in terms of shifting to agile, and what are the process, organizational, and technology issues that must be addressed as a group? How do business users struggle with disparate approaches and inadequate coordination, and what are the costs (in terms of downtime, delayed releases, and inefficient resource allocation)? What is the impact of delayed and/or ad hoc operational decisions about product quality and enhancements? What are the key up-front benefits of an effective approach that coordinates SoRs with intelligent application, change, and quality management through the life cycle? Capabilities that can enable visibility into existing mainframe applications include the ability to analyze and visualize relationships between application components, data, and jobs. This would encompass visibility into application structure across languages and platforms, IDE-integrated impact analysis to increase visibility into change impact to help reduce risk and cut costs, operational performance visibility to help prioritize the initiatives on which to focus, and the ability to synchronize source control information with application analysis, delivery, and cognitive capabilities to help create a single source of information. Also helpful to this process is the ability to automate documentation, enable understanding of on-demand deployment, and provide visibility into the consequences and size of 2018 IDC #US

4 change management initiatives. Root cause analysis can help rapidly estimate the effort required to implement and address needed changes. Organizations must also enforce coding standards and can help understand the health of their application portfolios through trend analysis and correlation across existing software. Companies find that analysis of trends for program complexity and maintainability and leverage of operations and test data gives needed visibility into pragmatic action that can be taken to improve the overall health of the mainframe application portfolio. These examples of functionality to enable a transition to SoR engagement must be coupled with appropriate process and organizational change to adopt tools automation in conjunction with agile practices, as we discussed previously. We see these combined efforts as linchpins for making a transition to digital transformation strategies that benefit from the ability to unlock access to key mainframe applications. IBM SOLUTIONS As part of IBM's broad portfolio for development and deployment across environments, the company released Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence (ADDI) in IBM's intent was to enable solutions for application discovery, delivery, visualization, and analytics to help transition organizations to more effective approaches for mainframe SoRs. (This approach should include an understanding of the need for agile processes in conjunction with tools automation.) The company also sought to help organizations establish coordinated quality and change management approaches that could be facilitated as part of DevOps processes enabling integration for users across development environments through to deployment with efficient testing, change management, and high-quality releases. IBM launched Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence after acquiring EZSource in 2016 and combined this acquisition with IBM's existing delivery intelligence product to create ADDI. The "intelligence" of ADDI for application delivery intelligence includes a web-based dashboard that provides a view of the application landscape and helps users find information about the health of the portfolio. This assists with development activity, leveraging data sets including static analysis data from Application Discovery, performance metrics from IBM OMEGAMON for CICS with data that enables monitoring of transactions, and integration with code coverage with IBM Developer for z and debugging tools. ADDI then correlates these data sets to give users insight into the application portfolio to help optimize understanding. ADDI can provide a collaborative web platform for subject matter experts (SMEs), business analysts, enterprise architects, and application developers to help collect and make connections between different enterprise software assets. ADDI's intent is to allow users to define a scope of analysis for changing business policies or rules contained in the software. This top-down approach (using business terms) can assist users by identifying entry points for creating APIs for their software and to help them find business rules hidden in large monolithic code. This can enable them to respond to changing business requirements. The collaborative nature of the platform can let users coordinate with one another and help them capture knowledge about their enterprise software assets to be able to group their application portfolio in a logical way for improved analysis. IBM has also begun to apply some machine learning techniques for ADDI, with additional support planned for future releases. Current support includes the ability to leverage information from existing data sources to do initial predictive analytics for DevOps. Longer term, IBM plans to use Watson primarily for discovery aspects; IBM has a set of discovery APIs, and it is also exploring ways to leverage pure machine learning algorithms IDC #US

5 IBM's key goals with this product set include increased productivity for SoR developers with improved software portfolio understanding for new z/os developers, reduced application downtime, increased deployment speeds, fewer application support and maintenance costs, and more efficient quality "fix" cycles. ADDI provides static and dynamic software analysis that is built on a single repository. The product's dashboard offers visibility into hyperlinked visualization layouts and automatic synchronization of z/os application components, along with the ability to detect and make visible dependencies within and among applications in the software portfolio. Other capabilities include the ability to produce and correlate detailed reporting on application components, including impact analysis for current and proposed changes, information about where the applications are being used, support for z/os application APIs, and integration with third-party Eclipse tools. The product supports standards enforcement and metrics collection/assessments to help deliver consistent, higher-quality code. ADDI also seeks to enable communications between application developers and operations teams by including online table and control block specifications with visibility into batch scheduling metadata and system infrastructure configurations. ADDI's Eclipse IDE support provides a possible on-ramp for incoming, new developers with little prior z/os expertise. In that context ADDI offers high-level visualizations that break complex applications into consumable parts to help facilitate education and the transition to z/os maintenance for neophyte z/os developers. ADDI also produces quality health metrics and analytic trends by collecting and correlating information that includes coverage data, test case data, and defect data. In this way, stakeholders can leverage metrics to prioritize on areas of greatest, imperative need. Customers tend to use the product for several sets of use cases: to help accelerate digital transformation initiatives (to transition to APIs and microservices), to reduce risk by understanding what users have in their mainframe z/os software portfolios, to understand potential impacts of changes, and to help increase productivity. The visual analytics capabilities for application intelligence can potentially help developers accelerate their digital transformation by giving insight into the "black box" of existing legacy SoR software. In this way, ADDI can help customers unlock the value of their existing application ecosystem. Without advanced analytics like those available with IBM's ADDI, developers would need to manually review millions of lines of code for insight into their application portfolios an overwhelming and challenging task. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IBM's overarching product portfolio is both a benefit and a challenge in the context of making users aware of the company's capabilities for application analytics, quality, and change impact analysis for software in mainframe environments. The sheer volume of IBM software capabilities across myriad platforms can make visibility and attention difficult for products in a software tools area like this. Similarly, the broad user base that IBM supports requires targeted messaging and education to successfully engage those who would most benefit. Additionally, IBM's services arm works with both IBM and competitors targeting these areas, so there are opportunities for leverage on the part of IBM Global Business Services, but use of IBM technology for mainframe SoR leverage from both digital transformation and DevOps initiatives is mixed. That said, IBM has a massive customer base with declining resources for mainframe SoR support that urgently needs and is ripe for usage of the specific capabilities for ADDI that have been laid out in this white paper. If well focused, IBM can leverage ADDI's functionality to enable application visibility, 2018 IDC #US

6 analytics, quality, and delivery across differing user bases. Communicating these capabilities will educate customers in modern approaches and enable a favorable transition for developers entering the workforce. CONCLUSION/RECOMMENDATIONS Enterprise organizations urgently need cogent strategies to address a decline in resources with expertise in mainframe monolithic applications and SoR support. As knowledgeable teams retire and move out of the workforce, there is an increased sense of urgency on the part of organizations for visibility, analytics, and access to effective automation (coupled with process change) to succeed in transitioning younger developers to support mainframe systems. At the same time, IDC sees organizations being straitjacketed in their digital transformation initiatives as they seek to leverage back-end software but are unable to leverage these applications effectively due to lack of insight. We advise enterprise organizations to evaluate automation tools that enable visibility into z/os and other mainframe applications to be able to transition effectively. Organizations must evolve back-end mainframe software environments through incremental evolutionary change. Strategies must be put into place to coordinate code changes, quality, and analytics and be coupled with agile development for effective DevOps. These kinds of automation tools can play a key role for enterprises that want to expose their business-critical assets along with process change to achieve continuous delivery with effective testing, change management, quality approaches, and analytics IDC #US

7 About IDC International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology media, research, and events company. Global Headquarters 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA idc-community.com Copyright Notice External Publication of IDC Information and Data Any IDC information that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from the appropriate IDC Vice President or Country Manager. A draft of the proposed document should accompany any such request. IDC reserves the right to deny approval of external usage for any reason. Copyright 2018 IDC. Reproduction without written permission is completely forbidden USEN-00