Case Study: T-Mobile's Massive Data Center Transformation Journey Wins Award Using HP ALM Tools

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how awarding-winning communications company T-Mobile improved application quality, while setting up two new data centers.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solution trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions.

Our latest user case study focuses on an award-wining migration and transformation and a grand-scale data center transition for T-Mobile. I was really impressed with the scope and size and the amount of time -- in terms of being short -- for you all to do this.

We're here with two folks who are going to tell us more about what T-Mobile has done to set up two data centers, and how in the process they have improved their application quality and the processes behind their application lifecycle management (ALM). [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

So join me in welcoming Michael Cooper, Senior Director of Enterprise IT Quality Assurance at T-Mobile. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Cooper: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also here with Kirthy Chennaian, Director Enterprise IT Quality Management at T-Mobile. Welcome.

Kirthy Chennaian: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Gardner: People don’t just do these sorts of massive, hundred million dollar-plus activities because it's nice to have. This must have been something that was really essential for you.

Cooper: Absolutely. There are some definite business drivers behind setting up a world-class, green data center and then a separate disaster-recovery data center. Just for a little bit of a clarification. The award that we won is primarily focused on the testing effort and the quality assurance (QA) effort that went into that.

Gardner: Kirthy, tell me why you decided to undertake both an application transformation as well as a data center transformation -- almost simultaneously?

Chennaian: Given the scope and complexity of the initiative, ensuring system availability was primarily the major driver behind this. QA plays a significant role in ensuring that both data centers were migrated simultaneously, that the applications were available in real-time, and that from a quality assurance and testing standpoint we had to meet time-frames and timelines.

Gardner: Let's get a sense of the scope. First and foremost, Michael, tell me about T-Mobile and its stature nowadays.

Significant company

Cooper: T-Mobile is a national provider of voice, data, and messaging services. Right now, we're the fourth largest carrier in the US and have about 33 million customers and $21 billion in revenue, actually a little bit more than that. So, it's a significant company.

We're a company that’s really focused on our customers, and we've gone through an IT modernization. The data center efforts were a big part of that IT modernization, in addition to modernizing our application platform.

Gardner: Let's also talk about the scope of your movement to a new data center, and then we can get into the application transformation parts of that. In a nutshell, what did we do here? It sounds like we've set up two modern data centers, and then migrated your apps and data from an older one into those.

Chennaian: Two world-class data centers, as Michael had pointed out. One in Wenatchee, Washington and the other one is Tempe, Arizona. The primary data center is the one in Wenatchee, and the failover disaster-recovery data center is in Tempe, Arizona.

Cooper: What we were doing was migrating more than 175 Tier 1 applications and Tier 0, and some Tier 2 as well. It was a significant effort requiring quite a bit of planning, and the HP tools had a big part in that, especially in the QA realm.

Gardner: Now, were these customer-facing apps, internal apps, logistics? Are we talking about retail? Give me a sense of the scope here on the breadth and depth of your apps?

Chennaian: Significant. We're talking critical applications that are customer-facing. We're talking enterprise applications that span across the entire organization. And, we're also talking about applications that support these critical front-end applications. So, as Michael pointed out, 175 applications needed to be migrated across both of the data centers.

For example, moving T-Mobile.com, which is a customer-facing critical application, ensuring that it was transitioned seamlessly and was available to the customer in real-time was probably one of the key examples of the criticality behind ensuring QA for this effort.

Gardner: IT is critical for almost all companies nowadays, but I can't imagine a company where technology is more essential and critical than T-Mobile as a data and services carrier.

What's the case with the customer response? Do you have any business metrics, now that you’ve gone through this, that demonstrate not just that you're able to get better efficiency and your employees are getting better response times from their apps and data, but is there like a tangible business benefit, Michael?

Near-perfect availability

Cooper: I can't give you the exact specifics, but we've had significant increases in our system up-time and almost near-perfect availability in most areas. That’s been the biggest thing.

Kirthy mentioned T-Mobile.com. That’s an example where, instead of the primary and the backup, we actually have an active-active situation in the data center. So, if one goes down the other one is there, and this is significant.

A significant part of the way that we used HP tools in this process was not only the functional testing with Quick Test Professional and Quality Center, but we also did the performance testing with Performance Center and found some very significant issues that would have gone on to production.

This is a unique situation, because we actually got to do the performance testing live in the performance environments. We had to scale up to real performance types of loads and found some real issues that -- instead of the customers facing them, they didn’t have to face them.

The other thing that we did that was unique was high-availability testing. We tested each server to make sure that if one went down, the other ones were stable and could support our customers.

We were able to deliver application availability, ensure a timeframe for the migration and leverage the ability to use automation tools.

Gardner: Now, this was a case where not only were you migrating apps, but you were able to go in and make sure that they were going to perform well within this in new environment. As you pointed out, Michael, you were able to find some issues in those apps in the transition, and at the same time simultaneously you upgraded to the more recent refreshes of the HP products to do that.

So, this was literally changing the wings on the airplane when it was still flying. Tell me why doing it all at once was a good thing.

Chennaian: It was the fact that we were able to leverage the additional functionality that the HP suite of products provide. We were able to deliver application availability, ensure a time-frame for the migration and leverage the ability to use automation tools that HP provides. With Quick Test Professional, for example, we migrated from version 9.5 to 10.0, and we were able to leverage the functionality with business process testing from a Quality Center standpoint.

As a whole, from an application lifecycle management and from an enterprise-wide QA and testing standpoint, it allowed us to ensure system availability and QA on a timely basis. So, it made sense to upgrade as we were undergoing this transformation.

Cooper: Good point, Kirthy. In addition to upgrading our tools and so forth, we also upgraded many of the servers to some of the latest Itanium technology. We also implemented a lot of the state-of-the-art virtualization services offered by HP, and some of the other partners as well.

Streamlined process

Using HP tools, we were able to create a regression test set for each of our Tier 1 applications in a standard way and a performance test for each one of the applications. So, we were able to streamline our whole QA process as a side-benefit of the data migration, building out these state-of-the-art data centers, and IT modernization.

Gardner: So, this really affected operations. You changed some platforms, you adopted the higher levels of virtualization, you're injecting quality into your apps, and you're moving them into an entirely new facility. That's very impressive, but it's not just me being impressed. You've won a People's Choice Award, voted by peers of the HP software community and their Customer Advisory Board. That must have felt pretty good.

Cooper: It feels excellent. In 2009, we won the IT Transformation Award. So, this isn't our first time to the party. That was for a different project. I think that in the community people know who we are and what we're capable of. It's really an honor that the people who are our peers, who read over the different submissions, decided that we were the ones that were at the top.

Gardner: And I hear that you've won some other awards as well.

Cooper: We've won lots of awards, but that's not what we do it for. The reason why we do the awards is for the team. It's a big morale builder for the team. Everybody is working hard. Some of these project people work night and day to get them done, and the proof of the pudding is the recognition by the industry.

Our CIO has a high belief in quality and really supports us in doing this. It's nice that we've got the industry recognition as well.

Honestly, we also couldn't do without great executive support. Our CIO has a high belief in quality and really supports us in doing this. It's nice that we've got the industry recognition as well.

Gardner: Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. You've got some metrics here. They were pretty impressive in turns of availability, cost savings, reduction in execution time, performance and stability improvements, and higher systems availability.

Give me a sense, from an IT perspective, if you were to go to some other organization, not in the carrier business, of course, and tell them what this really did for you, performance and in the metrics that count to IT, what would you tell them?

Cooper: The metrics I can speak to are from the QA perspective. We were able to do the testing and we never missed one of the testing deadlines. We cut our testing time using HP tools by about 50 percent through automation, and we can pretty accurately measure that. We probably have about 30 percent savings in the testing, but the best part of it is the availability. But, because of the sensitive nature and competitive marketplace, we're not going to talk exactly about what our availability is.

Gardner: And how about your particular point of pride on this one, Kirthy?

Chennaian: For one, being able to get recognized is an acknowledgement of all the work you do, and for your organization as a whole. Mike rightly pointed out that it boosts the morale of the organization. It also enables you to perform at a higher level. So, it's definitely a significant acknowledgment, and I'm very excited that we actually won the People's Choice Award.

Gardner: A number of other organizations and other series of industries are going to be facing the same kind of a situation, where it's not just going to be a slow, iterative improvement process,. They're going to have to go catalytic and make wholesale changes in the data center, looking for that efficiency benefit.

You've done that. You've improved on your QA and applications lifecycle benefits at the same time. With that 20-20 hindsight, what would you have done differently, or at least what could you advise people who are going to face a similar large, complex, and multifaceted undertaking?

Planning and strategy

Chennaian: If I were to do this again, I think there is definitely a significant opportunity with respect to planning and investing in the overall strategy of QA and testing for such a significant transformation. There has to be a standard methodology. You have to have the right toolsets in place. You have to plan for the entire transformation as a whole. Those are significant elements in successful transformation.

Gardner: Monday morning quarterback for you, Michael?

Cooper: We did a lot of things right. One of the things that we did right was to augment our team. We didn’t try to do the ongoing work with the exact same team. We brought in some extra specialists to work with us or to back-fill in some places. Other groups didn’t and paid the price, but that part worked out for us.

Also, it helped to have a seat at the table and say, "It's great to do a technology upgrade, but unless we really have the customer point of view and focus on the quality, you're not going to have success."

We were lucky enough to have that executive support and the seat at the table, to really have the go/no-go decisions. I don't think we really missed one in terms of ones that we said, "We shouldn't do it this time. Let's do it next time." Or, ones where we said, "Let's go." I can't remember even one application we had to roll back. Overall, it was very good. The other thing is, work with the right tools and the right partners.

Gardner: With data center transformation, after all, it's all about the apps. You were able to maintain that focus. You didn’t lose focus of the apps?

It's great to do a technology upgrade, but unless we really have the customer point of view and focus on the quality, you're not going to have success.

Cooper: Definitely.The applications do a couple of things. One, the ones that support the customers directly. Those have to have really high availability, and we're able to speed them up quite a bit with the newest and the latest hardware.

The other part are the apps that people don't think about that much, which are the ones that support the front lines, the ones that support retail and customer care and so forth. I would say that our business customers or internal customers have also really benefited from this project.

Gardner: Well great. We've been talking about a massive undertaking with data center transformation and application QA and lifecycle improvements and the result was a People's Choice Award won here at the Discover Show in Las Vegas. It's T-Mobile, the winner. We've been talking with their representatives here. Michael Cooper, the Senior Director of Enterprise IT Quality Assurance. Thanks again, Michael.

Cooper: Thank you, and we're very proud of the team.

Gardner: We are also here with Kirthy Chennaian, the Director of Enterprise IT Quality Management at T-Mobile. Thanks.

Chennaian: Thank you. Very excited to be here.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of User Experience Discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how awarding-winning communications company T-Mobile improved application quality, while setting up two data centers. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Case Study: Paychex Leverages HP Tools to Streamline and Automate Application Development

Transcript of a BreifingsDirect podcast from the HP Discover 2011 show in Las Vegas on how payroll and HR services provider Paychex gains benefit from integrated application development tools.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor the week of June 6 to explore some major enterprise IT solution trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Our enterprise case study today focuses on Paychex, a large provider of services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and growing rapidly around services for HR, payroll, benefits, tax payments, and quite a few other features.

We're here with Joel Karczewski, the Director of IT at Paychex, to learn about how automation and efficiency is changing the game in how they develop and deploy their applications. Welcome.

Joel Karczewski: Good to be here today, Dana.

Over the past few years, IT has been asked to deliver more quickly, to be more responsive to our business needs, and to help drive down costs in the way in which we develop, deploy, and deliver software and services to our end customers.

Gardner: First, Joel, do you have a philosophy about application development, and has it shifted over the past few years?

Karczewski: Yes, we do. Over the past few years, IT has been asked to deliver more quickly, to be more responsive to our business needs, and to help drive down costs in the way in which we develop, deploy, and deliver software and services to our end customers.

To accomplish that, we've been focusing on automating many of the tasks in a traditional software development lifecycle as much as possible to help make sure that when they're performed manually, they're not skipped.

For example, automating from a source code check in, automating the process by which we would close out defects, that source code was resolving, automating the testing that we do when we create a new service, automating the performance testing, automating the unit testing, the code coverage, the security testing, to make sure that we're not introducing key flaws or vulnerabilities that might be exposed to our external customers.

Gardner: Tell us a bit more about Paychex. I probably didn’t do it justice, but tell me the extent of your business and also how many applications you're dealing with?

Karczewski: That’s a great question. Applications are basically just a combination of integrated services, and we've been moving forward with a strategic service-based delivery model for approximately a year and a half now. We have hundreds of services that are reused and utilized by our applications.

Payroll provider

Paychex is primarily an HR benefits and payroll provider, and our key customers are approximately 570,000 business owners and the employees that work for those business owners.

Gardner: And are they typically small businesses?

Karczewski: Small to medium. We've been focusing on the small-business owner because we believe that’s where our specialty is.

Gardner: And, automation for your customers is super important. In order for you to extend automation to them, you have to have applications that are perform well and are well-tested. Tell me why a services orientation and services delivery model is so important in your particular business.

Karczewski: We used to have customers that existed on one end of the spectrum or the other. For example, there’s the customer who wants to come to the website and do everything for himself or herself, a website with a minimal interaction with a specialist that we may have working at one of our 90-plus branches across the United States.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the type of customer that wants Paychex to do everything for them. They don’t want to do anything themselves.

We have clients who want Paychex to do some of the business tasks for them, but they want to still do some of the tasks themselves.

What we have been finding over time is that we're developing a hybrid behavioral approach. We have clients who want Paychex to do some of the business tasks for them, but they want to still do some of the tasks themselves.

In order to satisfy the one end of the spectrum or the other and everything in between, we've been moving towards a service-based strategy where we can package, bundle, price, roll out, and deliver the set of services that fit the needs of that client in a very highly personalized and customized fashion.

Gardner: It also sounds like, being in the payroll business, you're dealing with integrations across multiple organizations and financial institutions, and therefore your applications are not just in a certain silo and operating inside your four walls, but you really have to interact across dynamic and extended environment. Therefore, I should think testing, regression testing, and performance management is super important.

Karczewski: That’s correct. The more that we can automate, the more we're able to test those services in the various combinations and environments with which they need to perform, with which they need to be highly available, and with which they need to be consistent.

Gardner: How about data? I should think that this is fairly sensitive data too. We're talking about people’s paychecks, their benefits, and so forth.

Personal information

Karczewski: We have an awful lot of information that is very personal and highly confidential. For example, think about the employees that work for one of these 560,000-plus business owners. We know when they are planning to retire. We know when they move, because they are changing their addresses. We know when they get married. We know when they have a child. We know an awful lot of information about them, including where they bank, and it’s highly, highly confidential information.

Gardner: I have a good sense now of some of your requirements, the fact that you have got many applications, you're services oriented, and you've got these important requirements around performance, security, privacy, and so forth. How did you come at the solution to being able to produce, deliver, and maintain applications with these requirements satisfied?

Karczewski: We took a step back and took a look at our software delivery lifecycle. We looked at areas that are potentially not as value-add, areas of our software delivery lifecycle that would cause an individual developer, a tester, or a project manager, to be manually taking care of tasks with which they are not that familiar.

For example, a developer knows how to write software. A developer doesn’t always know how to exercise our quality center or our defect tracking system, changing the ownership, changing statuses, and updating multiple repositories just to get his or her work done.

So, we took a look at tasks that cause latency in our software delivery lifecycle and we focused on automating those tasks.

A developer knows how to write software. A developer doesn’t always know how to exercise our quality center or our defect tracking system.

Gardner: It sounds like you're also quite comfortable with software as a service (SaaS) and on-premises. Is that the case? Are you a hybrid consumer of application lifecycle management services?

Karczewski: Yes, and we're moving more into that space on a daily basis.

Gardner: Tell me specifically what HP products you're using and which ones you have in your sights for some future development and testing?

Karczewski: We're using a host of HP products today. For example, in order to achieve automated functional testing, we're utilizing Quality Center (QC) in combination with Quick Test Professional (QTP). In order to do our performance testing, pre-production, we utilize. Post-production, we're beginning to look an awful lot at Real Use Monitor (RUM), and we're looking to interface RUM with ArcSight, so that when we do have an availability issue, and it is a performance issue for one of our users anywhere, utilizing our services, we're able to identify it quickly and identify the root cause.

Metrics of success

Gardner: Are there any metrics of success that you can point to in terms of moving into these products and applying the automation, ways that you can measure the impact of these particular solutions?

Karczewski: We've begun looking at that. For example, we're looking at the number of testing hours that it takes a manual tester to spin through a regression suite and we compare that with literally no time at all to schedule a regression test suite run. We're computing the number of hours that we're saving in the testing arena. We're computing the number of lines of software that a developer creates today in hopes that we'll be able to show the productivity gains that we're realizing from automation.

Gardner: So, it does sound like you're interested in more visibility and grasping the metrics of how applications are performing throughout their life cycle.

HP recently announced the IT Performance Suite and an Executive Scorecard to try to help folks move towards that higher level of visibility. Any thoughts about whether that's something that would fit into your needs and/or have you had a chance to look that over at all?

We're very interested in tying those KPIs, those metrics, and those indicators together with the Executive Scorecard.

Karczewski: We're very interested in looking at that. We're also very interested in tying the scorecard of the builds that we're doing in the construction and the development arena. We're very interested in tying those KPIs, those metrics, and those indicators together with the Executive Scorecard. There's a lot of interest there.

Gardner: I always like to try to give examples. It’s one thing to tell, but it’s even nicer to show. Do you have any examples of an actual development activity recently that you can point to and walk us through how you've done it, what the methodology is, using some of these products and services and developing the efficiencies and the reliability that you require?

Karczewski: Well, we did one thing, which is very new to us, but we hope to mainstream this in the future,. For the very first time, we employed an external organization from the cloud. We utilized LoadRunner and did a performance test directly against our production systems.

Why did we do that? Well, it’s a very huge challenge for us to build, support, and maintain many testing environments. In order to get a very accurate read on performance and load and how our production systems performed, we picked a peak off-time period, we got together with an external cloud testing firm and they utilized LoadRunner to do performance tests. We watched the capacity of our databases, the capacity of our servers, the capacity of our network, and the capacity of our storage systems, as they throttled the volume forward.

We plan to do more of that as a final checkout, when we deliver new services into our production environment.

Gardner: Well, great. We've been learning about how development and lifecycle management is important for Paychex. It’s a human resources and payroll services company based in Rochester, N.Y. I want to thank our guest. We've been talking with Joel Karczewski. He is the Director of IT at Paychex. Thank you.

Karczewski: Thank you.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the show floor and we're going to be talking about more HP news and finding more case studies to delve into.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user experience discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BreifingsDirect podcast from the HP Discover 2011 show in Las Vegas on how payroll and HR services provider Paychex gains benefit from application development tools. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• Deep-Dive Discussion on HP's New Converged Infrastrcture, EcoPOD and AppSystem Releases at Discover
• HP delivers applications appliance solutions that leverage converged infrastructure for virtualization, data management
• HP takes plunge on dual cloud bursting: public and-or private apps support comes of age
  
• HP rolls out EcoPOD modular data center, provides high-density converged infrastructure with extreme energy efficiency
• HP at Discover releases converged infrastructure products and services aimed at helping IT migrate rapidly to the future
  
• HP's IT Performance Suite empowers IT leaders with unified view into total operations, costs

Case Study: How McKesson Develops Software Faster and Better with Innovative Use of New HP ALM 11 Suite

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the recent HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you in conjunction with the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference last month in Barcelona.

We're here to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations, making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your host throughout this series of Software Universe Live discussions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Our customer case study today focuses on McKesson and how their business has benefited from advanced application lifecycle management (ALM). To learn more about McKesson's innovative use of ALM and its early experience with HP's new ALM 11 release, I'm here with Todd Eaton, Director of ALM Tools and Services at McKesson. Welcome, Todd.

Todd Eaton: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: I know you've been involved with ALM for quite some time, but what is it about ALM now in your business that makes it so important and beneficial?

Eaton: In our business at McKesson, we have various groups that develop software, not only for internal use, but also external use by our customers and software that we sell. We have various groups within McKesson that use the centralized tools, and the ALM tools are pretty much their lifeblood. As they go through the process to develop the software, they rely heavily on our centralized tools to help them make better software faster.

Gardner: Is ALM something you use within the groups -- and then also to bind those groups; that is to say, there is a tactical ... and then even strategic benefit as well?

Eaton: Yes. The ALM suite that HP came out with is definitely giving us a bigger view. We've got QA managers that are in the development groups for multiple products, and as they test their software and go through that whole process, they're able to see holistically across their product lines with this.

We've set up projects with the same templates. With that, they have some cohesion and they can see how their different applications are going in an apples-to-apples comparison, instead of like the old days, when they had to manually adjust the data to try to figure out what their world was all about.

Gardner: At this point, are there any concrete benefits, either in terms of business benefits, or in the IT application development side of the business that you can point to that these ALM innovations have supported?

Better status

Eaton: There are a couple of them. When HP came up with ALM 11, they took Quality Center and Performance Center and brought them together. That's the very first thing, because it was difficult for us and for the QA managers to see all of the testing activities. With ALM, they're able to see all of it and better gauge where they are in the process. So, they can give their management or their teams a better status of where we are in the testing process and where we are in the delivery process.

The other really cool thing that we found was the Sprinter function. We haven't used it as much within McKesson, because we have very specific testing procedures and processes. Sprinter is used more as you're doing ad hoc testing. It will record that so you can go back and repeat those.

How we see that being used is by extending that to our customers. When our customers are installing our products and are doing their exploratory testing, which is what they normally do, we can give them a mechanism to record what they are doing. Then, we can go back and repeat that. Those are a couple of pretty powerful things in the new release that we plan to leverage.

Gardner: How would you describe the problem that we need to solve here? Is this a problem of communication, of measurement, perhaps workflow management, or all the above? How would you characterize what's wrong with how application development has been done? I don't mean to point to you as falling short on this at all. This is a general issue, but what is the problem that you think ALM is really addressing?

Eaton: That's a good point. When we're meeting at various conferences and such, there's a common theme that we hear. One is workflow. That's a big piece. ALM goes a long way to be able to conquer the various workflows. Within an organization, there will be various workflows being done, but you're still able to bring up those measurements, like another point that you are bringing up, and have a fairly decent comparison.

They can find those defects earlier, verify that those are defects, and there is less of that communication disconnect between the groups.

With the various workflows in the past, there used to be a real disparate way of looking at how software is being developed. But with ALM 11, they're starting to bring that together more.

The other piece of it is the communication, and having the testers communicate directly to those development groups. There is a bit of "defect ping-pong," if you will, where QA will find a defect and development will say that it's not a defect. It will go back and forth, until they get an agreement on it.

ALM is starting to close that gap. We're able to push out the use of ALM to the development groups, and so they can see that. They use a lot of the functions within ALM 11 in their development process. So, they can find those defects earlier, verify that those are defects, and there is less of that communication disconnect between the groups.

Gardner: It sounds like it’s beginning to quicken the pace of how you go about these things, but in addition to that, are you exploiting agile development practices, and is this something that's helping you if you are?

Eaton: We have several groups within our organization that use agile development practices. What we're finding is that the way they're doing work can integrate with ALM 11. The testing groups still want to have an area where they can put their test cases, do their test labs, run through their automation, and see that holistic approach, but they need it within the other agile tools that are out there.

It's integrating well with it so far, and we're finding that it lends itself to that story of how those things are being done, even in the agile development process.

Gardner: You're a large organization, a large healthcare provider and insurer. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about McKesson, where you're based, and the size and extent of your application development organization.

Company profile

Eaton: McKesson is a Fortune 15 company. It is the largest health-care services company in the U.S. We have quite a few R&D organizations and it spans across our two major divisions, McKesson Distribution and McKesson Technology solutions.

In our quality center, we have about 200 projects with a couple of thousand registered users. We're averaging probably about 500 concurrent users every minute of the day, following-the-sun, as we develop. We have development teams, not only in the U.S, but nearshore and offshore as well.

We're a fairly large organization, very mature in our development processes. In some groups, we have new development, legacy, maintenance, and the such. So, we span the gamut on all the different types of development that you could find.

Gardner: Well, that's interesting, because I wanted to explore the size of the organization. It sounded a moment ago as if you were able to support different styles, different cultures, different maturity levels, as you have mentioned, among and between these different parts of your development cycle, all using the same increasingly centralized ALM approach. Is that fair?

Eaton: Yeah, that's fair. That's what we strive for. In my group, we provide the centralized R&D tools. ALM 11 is just one of the various tools that we use, and we always look for tools that will fit multiple development processes.

They have to adapt to all that, and we needed to have tools that do that, and ALM 11 fits that bill.

We also make sure that it covers the various technology stacks. You could have Microsoft, Java, Flex, Google Web Toolkit, that type of thing, and they have to fit that. You also talked about maturity and the various maturity models, be it CMMI, ITIL, or when you start getting into our world, we have to take into consideration FDA.

When we look at tools, we look at those three and at deployment. Is this going to be internally used, is this going to be hosted and used through an external customer, or are we going to package this up and send it out for sale?

We need tools that span across those four different types, four different levels, that they can adapt into each one of them. If I'm a Microsoft shop that’s doing Agile for an internal developed software, and I am CMMI, that's one. But, I may have a group right next door that's waterfall developing on Java and is more an ITIL based, and it gets deployed to a hosted environment.

They have to adapt to all that, and we needed to have tools that do that, and ALM 11 fits that bill.

Gardner: So, it's the benefits of decentralized and the benefits of centralized in terms of the system-of-record approach, having at least a metaview of what's going on, even though there is still flexibility at the edge.

Eaton: Correct. ALM 11 had a good foundation. The test cases, the test set, the automated testing, whether functional or performance, the source of truth for that is in the ALM 11 product suite. And, it's fairly well-known and recognized throughout the company. So, that is a good point. You have to have a source of truth for certain aspects of your development cycle.

Gardner: Of course, your industry has significant level of regulation and compliance issues. Is ALM 11 something that's been a benefit in that regard?

Partner tools

Eaton: It has been a benefit. There are partner tools that go along with ALM 11 that help us meet those various regulations. Something that we're always mindful of, as we develop software, is not only watching out for the benefit of our customers and for our shareholders, but also we understand the regulations. New ones are coming out practically every day, it seems. We try to keep that in mind, and the ALM 11 tool is able to adapt to that fairly easily.

Gardner: You've been an early adopter. You've implemented certain portions of ALM 11, and you have a great deal of experience with ALM as a function. Looking back on your experience, what would you offer as advice to someone who might just be getting their feet wet in regard to either ALM or specifically ALM 11?

Eaton: When I talk to other groups about ALM 11 and what they should be watching out for, I tell them to have an idea of how your world is. Whether you're a real small shop, or a large organization like us, there are characteristics that you have to understand. How I identify those different stacks of things that they need to watch out for; they need to keep in mind their organization’s pieces that they have to adapt to. As long as they understand that, they should be able to adapt the tool to their processes and to their stacks.

Most of the time, when I see people struggling, it's because they couldn’t easily identify, "This is what we are, and this is what we are dealing with." They usually make midstream corrections that are pretty painful.

Gardner: And your title is interesting to me, Todd: Director of ALM Tools and Services. This is an organizational question, I suppose. Do you think it is a good policy, now that you have had experience in this, to actually devoting an individual or maybe a team to just overseeing the ALM tools, which in fact oversees the ALM process?

They look to us to be able to offload that and have a team to do that.

Eaton: That's an interesting point, and something that we've done at McKesson that appears to work out real well. When I deal with various R&D vice presidents and directors, and testing managers and directors as well, the thing that they always come back to is that they have a job to do. And one of the things they don't want to have to deal with is trying to manage a tool.

They've got things that they want to accomplish and that they're driven by: performance reviews, revenue, and that type of thing. So, they look to us to be able to offload that, and to have a team to do that.

McKesson, as I said, is fairly large, thousands of developers and testers throughout the company. So, it makes sense to have a fairly robust team like us managing those tools. But, even in a smaller shop, having a group that does that -- that manages the tools -- can offload that responsibility from the groups that need to concentrate on creating code and products.

Gardner: Well, great. Thank you for sharing your experiences. We've been hearing about ALM best practices and the use of HP's new ALM 11 by an early adopter and his experience, Todd Eaton, Director of ALM Tools and Services at McKesson. Thank you, Todd.

Eaton: You're welcome, Dana. It was nice talking to you.

Dana Gardner: I want to thank also our listeners for joining the special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you in conjunction with the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference.

Look for other podcasts from this event on the hp.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect network.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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HP's New ALM 11 Guides IT Through Shifting Landscape of Application Development and Service Requirements

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.

We're here the week of November 29, 2010 to explore some major enterprise software and solutions, trends and innovations, making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I’ll be your host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Software Universe Live Discussions. To learn more about HP’s application life-cycle management (ALM) news and its customer impact from the conference here, please join me now in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Product Marketing for HP applications. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Sarbiewski: Thank you, Dana. Good to be with you.

Gardner: Good to be with you. We've seen, over the past several years, sort of a shifting landscape of how applications are delivered and deployed. It seems as if the traditional way of doing this just isn’t working, and there seems to be complexity, slowness, and quality issues. First, why is that, and then second, what is HP doing about it?

Sarbiewski: It’s a question that we talk to our customers about all the time. It boils down to the same old changes that we see sort of every 10 years. A new technology comes into play with all its great opportunity and problems, and we revisit how we do this. In the last several years, it’s been about how do I get a global team going, focused on potentially a brand-new process and approach.

You’ve got changes in how you are organized. You’ve got changes in the approach that people are taking. And, you’ve got brand-new technology in the mix and new ways of actually constructing applications. All of these hold great promise, but great challenges too. That's clashing with the legacy approach that people in the past took in building software.

Gardner: What is HP going to about this? We’ve got kind of an inflection point, a generational shift. Now, what’s the response?

Sarbiewski: The short answer is that that legacy approach is not going to be the right path for delivering modern applications. As far as the core problems that I just mentioned, we’ve been hard at work for a couple of years now, recasting and re-inventing our portfolio to match that modern approach to software, going through them one-by-one.

What are the new technologies that everybody is employing? We’ve got rich Internet technologies, Web 2.0, approaches and our technology is there. For composite applications, we’ve built a variety of capabilities that help people understand how to make the performance right with those technologies, keep the security and the quality high, while keeping the speed up.

Moving to Agile

So it’s everything from how do we do performance testing in that environment to testing things that don’t have interfaces, and how do we understand the impact of change on the systems like that. We’ve built capabilities that help people move to Agile as a process approach, things like fundamentally changing how they can do exploratory testing, and how they can bring in automation much sooner in the process of performance, quality, and security.

Lastly, we’ve been very focused on creating a single, unified system that scales to tens of thousands of users. And, it’s a web-based system, so that wherever the team members are located, even if they don’t work for you, they can become a harmonious part of the overall team, 24-hour cycles around the globe. It speeds everything up, but it also keeps everyone on the same page. It’s that kind of anytime, anywhere access that’s just required in this modern approach to software.

Gardner: As I'm hearing the news here at the show being rolled out, it occurs to me that we're bringing together aspects of this whole lifecycle that for decades been very distinct and different, usually from different vendors, and with wholly different platforms beneath them. So, why is it important that ALM 11 pretty much has an integrated system with all the stakeholders, all the team member focused in the same direction or at least integrated at some level? [See more on HP's new ALM 11 offerings.]

Sarbiewski: When I talk to customers, I ask them, how they're supporting software. If we talk about software delivery, it's fundamentally a team sport. There isn't a single stakeholder that does it all. They all have to play and do their part.

When they tell me they’ve got requirements management in Word, Excel, or maybe even a requirements tool, and they have a bug database for this, test management for that, and this tool here, on the surface it looks like they fitted everybody with a tool and it must be good. Right?

The problem is that the work is not isolated. You might be helping each individual stakeholder out a little bit, but you're not helping the team.

The problem is that the work is not isolated. You might be helping each individual stakeholder out a little bit, but you're not helping the team. The team’s work relates to each other. When requirements get created or changed, it's the ripple effect. What tests have to be modified or newly created? What code then has to be modified? When that code gets checked in, what tests has to be run? It’s the ripple effect of the work we talk about it as workflow automation. It's also the insight to know exactly where you are.

When the real question of how far am I on this project or what quality level am I at -- am I ready to release -- needs to be answered in the context of everyone’s work, I have to understand how many requirements are tested? Is my highest priority stuff working against what code?

So, you see the team aspects of it. There is so much latency in a traditional approach. Even if each player has their own tool, it's how we get that latency out and the finger-pointing and the miscommunication that also results. We take all that out of that process and, lo and behold, we see our customers cutting their delivery times in half, dropping their defect rates by 80 percent or more, and actually doing this more cheaply with fewer people.

Gardner: So clearly HP ALM 11 is not going to allow sacrifice in the overall process for some individual choice and benefits, but let's get into the actual parts here. We have elements that are updated around requirements, development, and quality. Tell me a little bit about the constituent parts of this overall umbrella.

Sarbiewski: In requirements management, one of the big new things that we’ve done is allow the import of business process models (BPMs) into the system. Now, we’ve got the whole business process flow that’s pulled right into the system. It can be pulled right from the systems like Eris or anything that’s putting in the standard business process modeling language (BPML) right into the system.

Actual business processes

Now, everyone who accesses ALM 11 can see the actual business process. We can start articulating that this is the highest priority flow. This step of the business process, maybe it's check credit or something like that, is an external thing but it's super-important. So, we’ve got to make sure we really test the heck out of that thing.

Everyone is aligned around what we’re doing, and all the requirements can be articulated in that same priority. The beautiful thing now about having all this in one place is that work connects to everything else. It connects to the test I set up, the test I run, the defects I find, and I can link it even back to the code, because we work with the major development tools like Visual Studio, Eclipse, and CollabNet.

Gardner: So what are the parts we have? We’ve got this really interesting requirements manager that’s integrated with BPM, and I want to get back to that in a moment. The second part is Performance Center update, and then we’ve got a new LoadRunner, right?

Sarbiewski: That’s exactly right. You mentioned Development Manager a minute ago. It's hugely important that we connect into the world of developers. They're already comfortable with their tools. We just want to integrate with that work, and that’s really what we’ve done. They become part of the workflow process. They become part of the traceability we have.

You mentioned performance testing. We have the industry leading solution here and major market share there. What we hear from our customers is that the coolest new technology they want to work with is also the most problematic from a performance standpoint.

The bottom line is that the coolest new Web 2.0 front ends can now be very easily performance tested.

We went back to the drawing board and reinvented how well we can understand these great new Web 2.0 technologies, in particular Ajax, which is really pervasive out there. We now can script from within the browser itself. The big breakthrough there is if the browser can understand it, we can understand it. Before, we were sort of on the outside looking in, trying to figure out what a slider bar really did, and when a slider bar was moved what did that mean.

Now, we can generate a very readable script. I challenge anybody. Even a businessperson can understand, when they're clicking through an application, what gets created for the performance testing script.

We parameterize it. We can script logic there. We can suggest alternate steps. The bottom line is that the coolest new Web 2.0 front ends can now be very easily performance tested. So we don't end up in that situation where it's great, you did a beautiful rich job, and it's such a compelling interface, but only works when 10 people are hitting the application. We've got to fix that problem.

It speeds everything up, because it's so readable and quick. And it just works seamlessly. We've tested against the top 40 websites, and they are out there out using all this great new technology and it's working flawlessly.

Gardner: So, we've had some significant improvements and upgrades. We’ve got better integration. We're looking at this at the process level and we brought in BPM. But, I also heard from the main stage presentation here in Barcelona about a couple of new things. We have Unified Functional Testing 11 and HP Sprinter. Could you help me understand a bit more about those?

Lots of pieces

Sarbiewski: Absolutely. If you think about a composite application, it's really made up of lots of pieces. There are application services or components. The idea is that if I’ve got something that works really well and I can reuse it as part of and combine it with maybe a few other things or in a couple of new pieces and I get new capability, I've saved money. I’ve moved faster and I'm delivering innovation to the business in a much better, quicker way and it should be rock-solid, because I can trust these components.

The challenge is, I'm not making up software made of lots of bits and pieces. I need to test every individual aspect of it. I need to test how they communicate together and I need to do end-to-end testing.

If I try to create composite apps and reuse all this technology, but it takes me ten times longer to test, I haven’t achieved my ultimate goal which was cheaper, faster and still high quality. So Unified Functional Testing is addressing that very challenge.

We've got Service Test which actually is incredible visual canvas for how I can test things that don't have an interface. One of the big challenges with something that doesn't have an interface is that I can't test it manually, because there are no buttons to push. It's all kind of under the covers. But, we have a wonderful, easy, brand-new reinvented tool here called Service Test that takes care of all that.

That’s connected and integrated with our functional testing product that allows you to test everything end-to-end in the GUI level. The beautiful thing about our approach is you get to do that end-to-end, GUI level type of testing and the non-GUI stuff all from one solution and you report out all the testing that you get done.

Bring in a lot of automation to speed it up, keep the quality high and the time down low and you get to see it all kind of come together in one place.

So again, bring in a lot of automation to speed it up, keep the quality high and the time down low and you get to see it all kind of come together in one place.

Gardner: Right. I was going to say we’ve heard a lot about Instant-On here as well. I am assuming that Sprinter might have something to offer there.

Sarbiewski: Absolutely. Sprinter is not even a reinvention. It's brand-new thinking about how we can do manual testing in an Agile world. Think of that Instant-On world. It's such a big change when people move to an Agile delivery approach. Everyone on the team now plays kind of a derivative role of what they used to do. Developers take a part of testing, and quality folks have to jump in super-early. It's just a huge change.

What Sprinter brings is a toolset for that tester, for that person who is jumping in, getting right after the code to give immediate feedback, and it's a toolset that allows that tester to automatically figure out what test apps are supposed to go through to drop in data instead of typing it in. I don't have to type it anymore. I can just use an Excel spreadsheet and I can start ripping through screens and tests really fast, because I'm not testing whether it can take the input. I'm testing whether it processes it right.

A bunch of cool tools

And when I come across an error, there's a tool that allows me to capture those screens, annotate them, and send that back to the developer. What’s our goal when we find a defect? The goal is to explain exactly what was done to create the defect and exactly where it is. There are a whole bunch of cool tools around that.

The last point I’d make about this is called Mirror Testing. It’s super-important. It’s imperative that things like websites actually work across the variety of browsers and operating environments and operating systems, but testing all those combinations is very painful.

Mirror Testing allows the system to work in the background, while someone is testing, say on XP and Internet Explorer, five other systems, different combinations will be driven on the exact same test. I'm sitting in front of it, doing my testing, and in the background, Safari is being tested or Firefox.

If there is an error on that system, I see it, I mark it, and I send it right away, essentially turning one tester into six. It's really great breakthrough thinking on the part of R&D here and a huge productivity bump.

Gardner: Now, we have some major shifts impacting developers and basically the entire lifecycle around apps. There’s more emphasis on mobile suddenly, and there’s a need to integrate with the business process side of things. There's the need to do things faster. We're also seeing an emphasis on mixed sourcing or hybrid computing. Then, just to make things more interesting, there's an emphasis on bringing these things out in a way that helps the business faster, and in a more declarative way. That is to say, it hits the bottom-line in a good way.

What we hear from our customers is that they really do want their lives to be simplified.

How was it that this overall set of capabilities you’ve described fit into these trends? It seems to me that you are trying to strike the balance between inclusive, and integrated, but also agnostic and open to all of these different aspects. Tell me how that works.

Sarbiewski: What we hear from our customers is that they really do want their lives to be simplified, and the conclusion that they have come to in many cases is Post-It Notes, emails, and Word docs. It seems simpler at first and then it quickly falls apart at scale. Conversely, if you have tools that you can only work with in one particular environment, and most enterprises have a lot of those, you end up with a complex mess.

Companies have said, "I have a set of development tools. I probably have some SAP, maybe some Oracle. I’ve got built-in .NET, with Microsoft. I do some Eclipse stuff and I do Java. I’ve got those but if you can work with those and if you can help me get a common approach to requirements, to managing tests, functional performance, security, manage my overall project, and integrate with those tools, you’ve made my life easier."

When we talk about being environment agnostic, that’s what we mean. Our goal is to support better than anyone else in the market the variety of environments that enterprises have. The developers are happy where they are. We want them as part of the process, but we don’t want to yank them out of their environment to participate. So our goal again is to support those environments and connect into that world without disrupting the developer.

And, the other piece that you mentioned is just as important. Most customers aren’t taking one uniform approach to software. They know they’ve got different types of projects. I’ve got some big infrastructure software projects that I am not going to do all the time and I am not going to release every 30 days and a waterfall approach or a sequential approach is perfect for that.

Rock solid

I want to make sure it’s rock solid, that I can afford to take that type of an approach, and it's the right approach. For a whole host of other projects, I want to be much more agile. I want to do 60-day releases or 90-day releases or even more, and it makes sense for those projects. What I don’t want, they tell us, I don’t want every team inventing their own approach for Waterfall, Agile, or custom approaches. I want to be able to help the teams follow a best-practice approach.

As far as the workflow, they can customize it. They can have an Agile best practice, a Waterfall best practice, and even another one if they want. The system helps the team do the right thing and get a common language, common approach, all that stuff. That’s the process kind of agnostic belief we have.

Gardner: Last, Mark, tell me how you get started. When are these going to be available, and are there any changes in licensing or pricing in terms of trying to make it simpler for people acquire these?

Sarbiewski: They're available now. The great news is that today you can download all the solutions that we’ve talked about for trials. We have some online demos that you can check out as well. There are a lot of white papers and other things. You can literally pull the software 30 minutes from now and see what I'm talking about.

On the licensing side, we believe that the simplest approach is a concurrent license, which we have on most of the products that we’ve got here. For all the modules that we’ve been talking about, if you have a concurrent license to the system, you can get any of the modules. And, it’s a nice floating license. You don’t have to count up everybody in your shop and figure out exactly who is going to be using what module.

The concurrent license model is very flexible, nice approach. It’s one we’ve had in the past. We're carrying it forward and we’ll look to continue to simplify and make it easier for customers to understand all the great capabilities and how to simply license so that they can get their teams to their modules for the capability they need.

Gardner: Thanks to Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, for giving us the deep-dive on HP's Application Lifecycle Management news and its customer impact from the conference.

Sarbiewski: Thank you, Dana. I appreciate the time.

Gardner: And Thanks to you for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona, Spain.

Look for other podcasts from this HP event on the HP.com website, as well as via the BriefingsDirect network.

I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

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• New book explores automating the managed applications lifecycle to accelerate delivery of business applications
  
  
• Automating the managed application lifecycle helps Delta Air Lines better deliver critical business applications
  
  
• How to automate ALM: Conclusions from new HP book on gaining improved business applications as a process