I predict that in 2012, DevOps will become the new IT buzzword, joining cloud, web services, Scrum, and many others in the buzzword pantheon. We in the agile community have been bouncing it around a fair bit as of late, and it seems to be gaining steam within the IT community in general.The basic premise behind DevOps is that your development strategy and operations strategy should reflect one another, and you should strive to optimize the whole IT process. This implies that development teams should work closely with your operations staff to smoothly deliver new releases into production, and that your operations staff should work closely with development teams to streamline critical production issues.

Making predictions is always a risky business. How does one really anticipate what might or might not happen in the coming year? The answer is that you observe what is going on in the industry and then form a picture of the patterns that you see emerging. Before I started writing this article, I wrote down the trends that I wanted to cover, based upon what I believe will be essential to understand in 2012. Then I looked back at my predictions article from January 2011, and realized that I had written about much of the same trends last year. Upon reflection, I realized that this is not surprising. Many of the trends that I see in 2012 have a development lifecycle spanning several years. The real challenge is to understand the factors that influence these trends and how they may impact you. The most important thing is to understand what you need to do in order to be successful in the face of the challenges that lie ahead. Here are my predictions for 2012 and some strategies for achieving success.

In "Agile ALM for Delivering Customer Value—Part 1,” I introduced an integrated agile ALM framework that includes traditional ALM, value chain, and agile methods. These elements, when combined, establish an innovative and powerful agile ALM framework focusing on delivering customer value. They also introduce some of the front-end disciplines of a lifecycle that can help you establish and maintain this effective ALM framework. In part 2, I explore the back-end disciplines of a lifecycle that establishes an effective ALM framework centering on customer value.

The year behind us was certainly very challenging. Between the tough economy, and even tougher technical challenges, many companies struggled to stay afloat—and some didn’t. Technical skills were in hot demand, but people skills were—as they usually are—equally important. The ability to collaborate with colleagues from very different backgrounds, and speak different languages with people from different locations and time zones, presented a remarkable set of challenges that were not new to IT, but quite difficult nonetheless. Companies shed thousands of workers to satisfy their shareholders only to discover that they could not find qualified and experienced subject matter experts (SMEs) when they were needed. As the COO of a consulting practice, my phone rang off the hook with both companies and other consulting firms looking for skilled candidates. I see 2012 as the year when companies will rediscover the importance of holding on to and developing their human resources like never before.

As I was thinking about writing this article, I reflected on the current state of application lifecycle management (ALM) and how it fits into an agile framework. For clarity, I define ALM to be a set of tools and practices that work together across the project lifecycle--from inception into production--to help you deliver an instance of a product (aka, a release). A reasonable ALM product will have a common user interface for utilizing the ALM functionality. It will also include a meta-model and process engine to parse and share information across and amongst the various functions within the ALM framework. I am fortunate enough to have been involved with both ALM and agile. Initially, I thought about simply sharing my view on the current state of ALM, as I have experienced it within an agile perspective.  Current ALM still needs to mature, and it still lacks a solid business reason for doing ALM; it also still lacks the true integration that is needed to make it seamless.  With that in mind I realized that I had an ideal state of what I would envision agile for ALM to look like, and it involves a strong business reason. 

Volume 9 - Number 12 - December 2011

This month's CM Journal brings us over the finish line to complete 2011—a year that had many challenges and certainly many opportunities. Taking a look back at where we came from is my main theme in "Behaviorally Speaking" with Joe Farah following up with the "Next Generation" and reflecting on CM and ALM tools. Leslie Sachs presents "Lessons Learned in Personality Matters," while proposing some reflections and resolutions and Adrian Cho treats us all to the "Pursuit of True Agility" as we examine some lessons learned from the great jazz musicians. It is always good to look back and learn while we prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and this issue certainly provides some thoughtful insights.

Make sure that you drop me a line and let me know what topics you would like us to cover in the coming year. What are the challenges you are facing? And don't forget to get ready to share your own best practices!

Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello@acm.org