here with permission from the publisher, WIS Publishing ... · Application lifecycle management...
Transcript of here with permission from the publisher, WIS Publishing ... · Application lifecycle management...
Co
lum
nALM: Tools and Tips
Kishore Bhamidipati ([email protected]) is an enterprise software products professional with experience defining and driving product and marketing strategy at large companies like Oracle, Mercury, and HP, as well as startups. At SAP, Kishore is responsible for defining and driving the global marketing messaging and strategy for the IT-oriented SAP solution extensions.
Subscribe today. Visit sapinsider.wispubs.com.
by Kishore Bhamidipati, SAP
Would You Build a House Without a Blueprint?Managing the Requirements and Design Phases of Your Application Projects
Application lifecycle management (ALM) is a
popular phrase among developers, administrators,
system architects, and IT system operators these
days, since IT systems are becoming more com-
plex and heterogeneous, and development efforts
are touching various points in the landscape.
In a previous SAPinsider article,� I provided a
holistic overview of ALM and discussed the role
it plays in helping the business of IT run more
smoothly. I also touched on the six phases of an
application’s life cycle and discussed the solu-
tion extensions offered by SAP that are targeted
to ALM.
In this article, I will dive deeper into the first
two ALM phases — Requirements and Design —
and uncover how the SAP Enterprise Modeling
application by IDS Scheer helps organizations
address the challenges that each of these phases
presents. I’ll also take you through the tool’s role
and benefits in two specific scenarios: developing
new SAP applications and upgrading existing
implementations.
Beginning the ALM Cycle: Requirements and DesignAs I noted in my previous article, application
lifecycle management is divided into six phases,
based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
standard: Requirements, Design, Build and Test,
Deploy, Operate, and Optimize (see Figure 1 on
the next page). Let’s look more closely at the
first two phases.
� See “8 Must-Have Tools for Your ALM Toolkit” by Kishore Bhamidipati in the April-June 20�0 issue of SAPinsider (sapinsider.wispubs.com).
Gather and Document Business Needs in the Requirements PhaseDuring this phase, business analysts define the
needs and requirements� for a project, a process
that includes:
Requirements analysis, which is critical to a
development project’s success, refers to the
tasks involved in determining the needs or
conditions for a new or altered product, while
taking into account the (sometimes conflict-
ing) requirements of stakeholders, including
end users. Requirements must be documented,
actionable, measurable, testable, related to
identified business needs or opportunities, and
sufficiently defined for system design.
Requirements management involves identi-
fying, eliciting, documenting, analyzing, tracing,
prioritizing, and agreeing on requirements.
It also includes monitoring changes and
communicating them to relevant stakeholders.
Requirements management is a continuous
process throughout the life of a project.
Blueprint and Model in the Design PhaseIn the Design phase, which is closely linked to
the Requirements phase, business analysts create
a blueprint for the application or solution by
selecting processes and scenarios to implement.
2 Requirements are capabilities that a project outcome (a finished product or service) must have. They can be functional or non-functional. Functional requirements are action-oriented tasks — for example, steps that must take place. Non-functional requirements describe, for example, how a final screen layout should appear.
This article appeared in the Oct n Nov n Dec 2010 issue of SAPinsider (http://sapinsider.wispubs.com) and appears here with permission from the publisher, WIS Publishing.
Subscribe today. Visit sapinsider.wispubs.com.
Requirements
Deploy
Optimize
Operate
Design
Build and Test
ApplicationLifecycle
Management
Software design is a process of understanding the
problem that the final solution should solve and
ensuring that the software can in fact address the
problem when it is ready. After the purpose and
specifications of software are determined, soft-
ware developers usually design a plan for a
solution. The plan includes low-level component
and algorithm implementation issues, as well as
the architectural view.
Many different tools are used during the Design
phase, including modeling tools or modeling lan-
guages, such as business process modeling notation
(BPMN) and Unified Modeling Language (UML).�
� A modeling language is any artificial language that can be used to express information, knowledge, or systems in a structure defined by a consistent set of rules. The rules are used to interpret the meaning of components in the structure. A modeling language can be graphical or textual.
Finding the Right Tools to Support Requirements and Design: Easier Said Than Done The Requirements and Design phases are per-
haps the most important phases of the full
application life cycle. You’d be hard-pressed to
complete a successful application project without
doing this upfront work. I equate it to custom-
building a house; a contractor can’t just start
buying concrete and sheetrock without asking
the homeowners what they want the house to
look like. Nor can he just start hammering and
nailing things together without a detailed blue-
print and schedule to follow.
But executing the Requirements and Design
phases isn’t easy. You have to keep track of needs
and specifications from various stakeholders. Plus,
written requirements often get lost in translation
Figure 1 u An overview of the six
ITIL phases of ALM; this article
focuses on the Requirements and
Design phases
Phase Explanation
Requirements Gather and document requirements for software projects, such as a new application.
Design Build a blueprint to design an application, and select processes and scenarios to
implement.
Build and Test Code, configure, compile, and test the application.
Deploy Move the application into production after it functioned well in the test environment.
Trigger the export of all transports into the production system, and import them.
Operate Manage the application in production using monitoring tools to ensure that it
performs as expected.
Optimize Introduce additional features through an upgrade or enhancement package.
Fine-tune the application in production to ensure it runs efficiently.
Targeted solution
extensions offer
functionality to assist
during various ALM
phases. This article
focuses on how SAP
Enterprise Modeling by
IDS Scheer assists with
the Requirements and
Design stages.
Subscribe today. Visit sapinsider.wispubs.com.
between business and IT. Companies would be
well-served to find a solution to help with this
process; one such solution is SAP Enterprise
Modeling by IDS Scheer.
SAP Enterprise Modeling offers a combination
of modeling, design, and process performance
management functionality that moves beyond
conceptual business process analysis toward the
planning and governance of corporate business
architecture.� This web-based, role-based, intuitive
solution, which both the business and IT sides
can use and collaborate around, assists with
enterprise modeling while also allowing you to
simulate how processes may be affected when new
applications are added or software is upgraded.
With this tool, you can structure, identify,
and describe the mission-critical IT components
within your infrastructure and align them to the
requirements of each business process. And, with
the integrated modeling environment, you can
design business processes based on consistent
standards throughout the enterprise and imple-
ment internal controls throughout your IT
architecture to comply with regulations and sup-
port your IT governance initiatives. The tool also
supports planning processes, from documenting
and analyzing the existing IT architecture to
establishing a whole new architecture (see side-
bar for additional benefits).
You can also reduce the complexity and dura-
tion of business intelligence consolidation projects
by modeling, integrating, and aligning views and
data flows from SAP NetWeaver Business Ware-
house (SAP NetWeaver BW). This makes it easier
to apply analytical information to your business
processes and provide valuable insight to your
employees as they execute day-to-day activities.
SAP Enterprise Modeling: 2 ALM Use CasesNow, let’s look at how organizations can use
SAP Enterprise Modeling in two ALM scenarios.
Scenario #1: Developing New SAP ApplicationsImagine that the product development team at
a retail company wants to create a new online
� The business architecture includes the planning and docu-mentation of processes with several levels of detail. It supports the governance of business processes and promotes their standardization across organizations.
bookstore to sell collateral. For the implementa-
tion of this new application, the business team
would need to determine — and communicate to
IT — the features they would like to include on
the website, such as the categories in which books
are listed, the type of shopping cart, and search
capabilities. This new application would need to
connect to the organization’s ERP back end to
incorporate financial information, as well as to a
database to store customer information.
When developing the requirements for this
implementation, business analysts would ideally
look at all possible scenarios and talk with other
stakeholders on the business side to consider
everyone’s requirements. They should look at the
big-picture goals of the project, including goals
from the end user’s perspective (in our example,
the end user is the customer browsing the online
store), and break the requirements down into
subtasks. It is advisable to do as much planning as
possible during this phase to avoid delaying or
derailing the development by drastically chang-
ing requirements later. Business analysts often
discuss, gather, and document requirements using
email, spreadsheets, and Microsoft Word documents.
And too often there is a disconnect between
business and IT after the requirements are handed
Key Benefits of SAP Enterprise Modeling by IDS ScheerWith SAP Enterprise Modeling, organizations can leverage their IT assets, improve performance, and reduce TCO; the tool significantly shortens timelines for upgrade and implementation projects, and simplifies customization based on business process requirements. It offers:
Process-oriented standardization of core business processes
One unique methodology for process roll-ins and roll-outs
An integrated, role-based, intuitive modeling environment
The ability to ensure process compliance and governance
Collaboration around shared views
The ability to maintain control over the organization’s IT architecture
Role-based publishing of business processes
The ability to optimize and standardize business processes to prepare for future upgrade or implementation projects
The ability to model business intelligence structures and data flows, and connect them to business processes
Subscribe today. Visit sapinsider.wispubs.com.
off to the developers — that is, business and IT
may not understand what the other side wants.
To address this challenge, SAP Enterprise
Modeling enables business analysts to draw a dia-
gram illustrating their requirements and vision
for the end product. With this tool, they can cre-
ate a visual representation (a block diagram) of
their requirements — in essence, designing and
modeling the flow of an application as they
gather requirements, resulting in less confusion,
ambiguity, and misinterpretation (see Figure 2).
SAP Enterprise Modeling allows business folks
and IT to collaborate around the same visual dia-
gram (a flow chart, for example) during the Design
phase (see Figure 3). It also supports modeling
methods, such as event-driven process chains
(EPCs) and languages such as BPMN and UML,
which both business and IT can understand. Plus,
the models can be stored in a central repository,
enabling users to easily access the most up-to-date
version. IT can then work from this diagram when
developing the code for the new application.
As business analysts design and model a new
application with SAP Enterprise Modeling, they
can work across both SAP and non-SAP platforms
and systems and synchronize business processes
that span different environments (such as finance
and sales). In our scenario, for example, the busi-
ness analysts can look at the model of the new
online store from a customer relationship man-
agement (CRM) view and a financials view. The
tool also contains functionality for administering
databases, users, reports, and scripts. For example,
teams can connect to existing databases, and mul-
tiple users can interact and use the same platform.
In addition, users can generate reports on the sta-
tus of the project or of the model itself, and they
can keep records of relevant project communica-
tions between business and IT.
Scenario #2: Upgrading Existing SAP ImplementationsSAP Enterprise Modeling can also help you opti-
mize and standardize business processes as you
upgrade the software that drives your business.
Imagine that you are a supply chain manager,
and your company has upgraded its SAP ERP sys-
tem to the latest version. You would need to
consider the new functionality that the upgrade
is introducing and determine how it affects your
existing business processes. For example, you may
find that functionality in the upgrade automati-
cally verifies values in a certain field, whereas this
step was previously done manually. Thus, you can
eliminate this step from the business process.
Most importantly, you also want to ensure that
your relevant business processes are integrated
and standardized. To make sure that these business
processes are integrated into the upgraded imple-
mentation and that you don’t lose functionality
or compromise your business process perfor-
mance as a result of the upgrade, SAP Enterprise
Modeling offers functionality and interfaces for
process-driven SAP software management; the
tools also takes advantage of the standard SAP
process scenario, which can describe both existing
Figure 2 u SAP Enterprise
Modeling combines business
and IT information on the
same screen
SAP Enterprise
Modeling enables you
to structure, identify,
and describe the
mission-critical IT
components within
your infrastructure and
align them to the
requirements of each
business process.
Which data is input?
Which data is output?
Which system supports the task?
Who is responsible?
Which IS functions are supported by the system?
Subscribe today. Visit sapinsider.wispubs.com.
“as-is” processes and future “to-be” processes.
With SAP Enterprise Modeling, you can get a
high-level view of the key processes, and then
drill down. This allows you to easily move from a
conceptual level to a logical or even a physical
level, all while maintaining appropriate relation-
ships and threads across these levels.
SAP Enterprise Modeling also allows you to
navigate to SAP transactions, access documenta-
tion of business scenarios and processes, and run
queries to see how a particular process would be
affected by an upgrade (see Figure 4). The tool
enables you to model business process execution
language (BPEL) processes in an early stage so
that you can then import them into SAP
NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP NetWeaver
PI) for enhancing, configuring, and executing.
Finally, SAP Enterprise Modeling allows you to
visualize data structures and data flows in your
new SAP implementation (see Figure 5).
Learn MoreClearly you can’t ignore the Requirements and
Design phases of ALM; these are integral steps to
any development project. But you don’t have to
dive into these phases without support — SAP
Enterprise Modeling by IDS Scheer can help you
more efficiently develop new SAP applications
and upgrade your existing SAP implementations.
To learn more, visit www.sap.com/solutions/
solutionextensions/enterprisemodeling. There
you can download a demo that walks through a
real-world example of how this solution extension
comes into play during an SAP software upgrade.
In an upcoming article, we will explore the
Build and Test phase and look at the relevant
solution extensions for that ALM stage. n
Figure 3 p A flow chart of a business process
Figure 4 p A business blueprint showing process changes
Figure 5 t You
can visualize data
structures and data
flows in a new SAP
implementation
SAP component
Transaction
SAP process step