Just Enough Governance for Notes Blog

1 - Agitage Lotus Maligners?

2 - Its difficult responding to this.

Your main assertion is that ALM is a widespread industry technique and the Lotus Notes community has failed to grasp it. Fair enough.

But I've been around the blog a fair few times, inside and outside the notes community. And I've never heard of ALM before.

You then go on to explain all the good stuff which ALM describes - fine. I've seen them used in many sites before, and advocate good practice should embrace these techniques.

Are you complaining because you never see these techniques used within the Notes community, or complaining that you never see the TLA 'ALM' in use?

I think if you look at most medium-large Notes shops, with say three or more developers, yes , these techniques are in use, usually supported by the likes of teamstudio Ciao! or Buildmanager - both excellent products.

So I suspect your assertion that us Notes programmers dont want or use such governance, change control, release control or deployment techniques is faulty.

In terms of UK and europe, for instance, we see standards frameworks such as ITIL used to great effect. And these embrace what you seem to define what ALM is.

Lastly, in terms of writing style, its often good to refrence some 'getting started' piece in terms of a TLA your introducing or claiming isnt in widespread use.

Hope this helps,

---* Bill

3 - Bill - Touche`. Lucidly Articulated.

Seriously for a moment, I apologize for neglecting to define the acronym. ALM is Application Lifecycle Management.

4 - Bill - You had asked some other questions that I didn't have time to respond to yesterday.

I really didn't mean to come across as complaining. It's more that I am curious to know if Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is simply not perceived as an important issue in the Lotus community or if it's simply that the acronym isn't used. I see a lot of the techniques used, but not necessarily as a wholistic solution. (By the way, I'm not convinced that many people are using a wholistic approach with other technologies either.)

I appreciate your point about frameworks in use address many of the issues being addressed with ALM. The primary difference I see here is that ALM generally refers to products that can help you with your ITIL or COBIT framework.

Still curious, so I'm hoping to hear from more people on this topic.

5 - I, too, did not recognize the TLA of ALM until I got a newsletter from TeamStudio where it defined it as Application Lifecycle Managment. We have been working for the past year to define our own internal SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) methodology that is to be applied to Notes as well as all other development platforms & languages. Not sure if our accronym is in total alignment with yours, but I believe we have been addressing those same points.

One of the difficulties we have run into is defining a manageable process that can be applied to the wide variety of environments, without creating another (somewhat buerecratic) layer that simply extends the time & cost of resources without providing any meaningful return.

For the Notes perspective, much of the work falls into smaller project sizes as we have defined them simply due to its RAD nature. You can do things much faster than in others (like Cobol or RPG in our case), and working within the previously defined coding guidelines we achieve some portions of the governance.

Finally, the "art vs. science" delivery process you mention, I am not clear on your position. Are you simply advocating that template usage and management be adhered to? Or do you propose something more elaborate?

6 - Brad, I was trying to see if Notes developers are practicing many of the concepts of ALM more than I was trying to make any particular point about the use of the specific term within the Notes community. Clearly your shop is one that is working to implement these concepts.

As far as the art vs. science goes, I would suggest that template usage and management may be all that is required. In some shops a more rigorous set of processes may be required. So much depends on the particulars of the development group, the company, etc.