
Introduction
Kovair with its ALM – an Application Lifecycle Management product and Omnibus Integration tool- an SOA architected Enterprise Service Bus helps organizations to build up an integrated ALM environment using their existing tools used for different development phases. Kovair acts as a central repository for multiple data systems that allows organizations to achieve the following:
- Seamless bi-directional data flow between different tools
- Better visibility of data from a central location
- Cross-tool data based reports and dashboards increasing release predictability
- Cross-tool data based traceability to ensure coverage and better impact analysis
- Event or scheduled based notification for keeping the stakeholders updated
- Establishing a DevOps environment by integrating tools of different domains and vendors
- Establishing a centrally controlled task based workflow across tools
The capabilities of Kovair Omnibus has been recognized in many organizations and the ROI of an
Integrated ALM environment has been proven from different stakeholders’ point of view.
The qualitative and financial benefits acknowledged by the stakeholders have been described in the following sections. The data that are enumerated in the following sections have all been derived from the customer experiences. These act as a good guide for what can be expected in a given situation provided there are differences in the number of tools, locations, and the number of people involved in the projects.
Benefits of Having an Integrated Development Ecosystem
- Seamless flow of artifacts from one stage of development to the other reducing duplication of efforts in different tools and saving cost as well as time
- Synchronized Engineering and Quality Processes for Development that helps reducing bugs, avoiding rework, and minimizing costs
- Instant visibility across projects and stages so that information is locked not in individual tools but in a single consolidated data repository for every group to review and act upon
- Real-time traceability across the entire Software Development Lifecycle that enhances productivity by avoiding confusions between teams and reducing the number of meetings, phone calls, and travel hours
- Consolidated Reports & Dashboards enabling better management decisions for corrective actions in a prompt manner reducing time-to-market cycles
- Event and Scheduled based notifications decreasing inter-stage transition time and manual interactions
- Early warning for Release instability, thus eliminating or reducing potential delivery delays
- Better Change Management & Impact Analysis to embrace change with lower risk and cost
The financial impact of the above benefits are quantified below based on customer inputs as experienced. It must be pointed out that each customer may experience different results based on their starting level of project efficiency, productivity, and quality compared to some others. However, the following is a good guideline for estimating cost benefits and computing ROI for a typical development environment. The benefits have been quantified from different stakeholders’ point of view.
Developers
An integrated ALM environment setup using Kovair Omnibus helps to improve productivity and reduce cost of development in different ways as stated below. Some of the benefits that developers get through integration with other tools using Kovair Omnibus are as follows:
- Plug-in based integration for IDEs to view different artifacts of ALM “in place”
- An ability to initiate unit testing, code coverage, and code analysis from the IDE
- Traceability view of test artifacts and their execution status from the IDE allowing them to identify what % of code is being tested
- Ability to perform static code analysis from the IDE allowing to validate their code even before checking in
- Helps them in better understanding of features without much manual interaction and dependency on other team members
- Gives them real-time visibility of defects and related information raised against their code
Numeric Benefits
Productivity gain: Let us consider that a developer spends around 4 hours a week on different tools for viewing information and updating status of the artifacts. With the help of Kovair’s IDE based integration, it has been observed that the time involvement in other tools reduces by 30% to 35% i.e. around 2.8 hours for each developer. This improvement considering a standard average salary for developers based on their locations can provide significant savings for the entire organization, or the project for which the integration activities are applicable.
Quality gain: The ability to do things like code analysis, unit testing, and code coverage from within the IDE helps developers to ensure code quality before checking in the files. This leads to quality gains and defect reductions at an estimated rate of 12% to 15%. Considering the fact, a good amount of savings can be easily done based on the average size of the groups, their average compensation, and overhead costs.
Testers
Today, with the advent of agility and early-to-market philosophy, it is very important to have an integrated environment for testing. It reduces the longer test cycles making the test process much more efficient and helps in early detection of bugs in the entire process of delivery. Here are some of the benefits that testers get from an
Integrated ALM platform using Kovair Omnibus.
- Allows testers to remain updated with real-time status of the development progress
- Keeps testers updated about information on Build status – content and defects
- Integration of automation testing tool allows testers to execute both manual and automated test scripts from one single location
- Enables real-time availability of multiple Test coverage statistics that helps in measuring progress of the ongoing testing activities
- Facilitates easy tracking of issues over time
- Incoming vs. fixed
- Source of issues over time
- Issue severity over time
- Issue disposition over time – analysis of triage decisions
- An ability to detect convergence, or lack thereof
- Enables risk-based testing
- Provides traceability of testing back to use cases, requirements, design, other artifacts for higher project visibility
Numeric Benefits
Productivity gain: Let us consider that testers spend around 10 hours of time for repetitive testing of the same scripts in different environments like development, staging, and production. With an integrated environment as mentioned above, these repetitive jobs can be almost eliminated. Thus the productivity of testers improves by almost 90%. Also, the productivity of testers improves by around 15% to 20% for not having the need to interact with other tools and team members for information gathering on requirement specification, development, and build status.
Quality gain: An integration with the test automation tools enables organizations to achieve a CI environment. Synchronous automation testing on successful build completion not only allows to detect early bugs but also allows more number of test cases to be executed. Automation testing itself improves the quality of delivery because of higher test coverage but the ability to execute it on successful build completion makes the process more efficient. This can lead to a gain of 15% to 20% in terms of time lag between build and start of testing. This type of integrated environment also provides more time for test case verification and thus reducing post deployment bugs by 30% to 35%. A good amount of savings can be easily done based on the average size of automation scripts, size of involved groups, their average compensation, and overhead costs.
Front line Manager
Integrated ALM environment achieved through Kovair Omnibus not only improves the productivity and quality from individual team’s perspective but also improves the productivity and quality for the frontline managers. Below are some of the points to elaborate this thought.
- Continuous updates on project status any time, any where
- Better visibility of Team and individual performance irrespective of locations for managers
- Real-time update on conformance to the code quality metrics and industry standards
- End to end traceability allows managers to do better impact analysis of change on project releases thus helping to take them correct decision
- Real-time update of Project Health
- Notification at every stage and for every purpose helps managers to react fast to any problem in the delivery lifecycle
- More objective oriented project status
- Consolidated and real-time reports and dashboards for project efficiency measurement
Numeric Benefits
Productivity gain: Let us consider that a manager spends around 15 hours a week on different meetings with respect to the overall progress of a release and gathering information for generation of reports and creation of reports. With the facilities of real-time status update of progress, cross-tool data based reports and dashboards offered by Kovair, it has been observed that time involvement in these meetings and report creation reduces by 70% to 75% i.e. around 4.5 hours for a manager.
Quality gain: The ability of having real-time cross-tool reports and dashboards, traceability, and central governance through task-based workflow cutting across different tools provide much better and informative control over the entire release progress. This leads to quality gains and timeline failure reductions at an estimated rate of 40% to 45%. A good amount of savings can be easily done based on the average size of the groups, their average compensation, and overhead costs.
Executives/Upper Management
Similar to other stakeholders, an
integrated ALM environment also benefits Executives/Upper management to a large extent. Some of the major benefits are listed below:
- Actionable information flowing upward leading to a quick strategic resolution
- Early warning for trouble resulting in fewer surprises that may otherwise arise at a later stage of the project
- Much more accuracy and consistency in reporting across projects and disciplines due to their real-time availabilities
- Task based workflow with notification keeping all stakeholders updated with necessary information which allows to implement a central governance for better control of a release
Support for CI and DevOps
In order to meet the challenge of getting early to the market, more and more organizations are moving towards DevOps. However, purchasing new tools to achieve this is a huge challenge for organizations that have already invested on different tools. Kovair Omnibus, with its large set of more than 60+ COTS tool integration helps organizations to achieve DevOps environment without supplanting any existing tool. Kovair has integration with many best-of-breed tools for different development phases supporting CI and DevOps. The