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3. Go with shorter lifecycles, cross-functional teams
The "mobile first" philosophy of modern development has also changed application lifecycle management in striking ways.
"Referring to a 'shorter development cycle' is misleading for Web development," says Andrew Frankel, former VP of engineering at TopShelfClothes.com. "It's no longer necessary to actually complete a full develop-QA-release cycle for every change. Small changes, such as changing text, can skip the usual process, since they can be deployed without any user impact. That frees the QA team to focus on testing actual application changes." Mobile and desktop app developers, he adds, aren't as lucky, since every change requires a new version.
For Telerik's Semeniuk, the biggest changes to application management are in Web and mobile. For those areas, he says, "You absolutely need short release cycles, because it's very difficult to pinpoint true customer value and interaction without actually measuring it."
This means getting items into customers' hands fast via a solid automation and deployment mode. "This has triggered a new flavor of app management called devops, where the dev team and the ops team need to work closely together to make sure that, as feedback is required, they can get that software into the hands of users without a lot of pain," he says.
Semeniuk also feels that, for larger organizations, overall team composition isn't shifting as quickly as it could to react to these changes: "Teams [in smaller organizations] have been shifting from functional roles -- business analyst teams, testing teams, deployment teams, etc. -- to cross-functional teams, where all the skills to envision, build, and deploy an application are on a single team. Teams then work together as a whole to deliver that software instead of handing it off between functional teams."
Some enterprises have a hard time making this shift to cross-functional roles, but Semeniuk believes this will change when "organizations can realize that an HR structure does not need to dictate a team structure."
4. Inventive use of the standard development toolkit
Modern development teams are extending the mantel of ingenuity right down to the tools they use, employing popular development
tools in new ways to spur further innovation in the development process. Consider Git, the open source revision control system -- which can be used for much more than its primary purpose. For Andrew Frankel, former VP of engineering at TopShelfClothes.com,
Git was also a way to perform process automation.
"Driving deployments with Git is fantastic for release management," Frankel says. "We have a complete log of what changed, at what time, and for what reasons. Larger organizations often try to collect exactly those data points using formal change requests, which tend to be frictional in a fast-paced environment. It's much more efficient to create a process where that information is collected automatically."
At Telerik, Git was adopted by one team as an escape hatch from the usual in-house development methodology.