Application Lifecycle Analytics Improve Development Reporting and Process

Need For Better Control and Insight into a Large Development Organization

Kaiser Permanente is a major provider of healthcare services and has an extensive software development organization responsible for creating and maintaining a large number of stragtegic line-of-business applications. They have fully integrated requirements management, change management, file and version control, and detailed defect tracking into their processes utilizing Borland's Caliber RM and StarTeam as well as Mercury's Quality Center.

While Kaiser has done an excellent job of implementing the tools and methodologies needed to effectively run their development organization, like many companies they are faced with having to continually improve their processes and do more with less budget. In order to accomplish this they need more transparency and insight into their current projects.

Furthermore, like many organizations, much of the reporting, tracking, subsequent management assessment and review of the development initiatives at Kaiser are subjective in nature and based on individual assessments.

SDLC Software Vendor Recommends ALM Analytics

As part of a corporate-wide initiative to improve and standardize their software development practices Kaiser was looking for ways to gather more objective measurements for both ongoing project management and to help them assess problem areas and indentify areas for improvement.

Given that much of the data they could be using for these objective measurements is Siloed in their SDLC tools and not always available in a format that facilitates reporting and analysis, Borland recommended ALM Analytics from Dunn Solutions Group (DSG)

DSG worked closely with Kaiser to identify what their goals were and what type of questions they wanted answers for to help meet those goals. DSG reviewed how they use their SDLC tool and in particular the work flow of their development life cycle, how projects are mapped across the various tools, and which user-defined fields they rely on.

Based on Kaiser's goals for improving both their process and project reporting, Dunn Solutions Group implemented ALM Analytics with three SDLC tool conduits to pool data from Borland's Caliber RM and StarTeam and Mercury's Quality Center. With ALM Analytics the data pulled from these tools is tracked over time and loaded into a common reporting data warehouse.

As part of the initial implementation, DSG worked with Kaiser to both identify a series of intial reports as well as to empower Kaiser to create their own reports utilizing BusinessObjects and a series of intuitive reporting universes.

Immediate Results and Long-Term Gain

The immediate result was more efficient reporting and analysis of development metrics providing greateer visibility into all of Kaier's ongoing software intiatives. The creation of a single repository and reporting interface for all development metrics improved efficiency and allows Kaiser to focus on more complex cross-tool analysis as they look for various causalities and ways to improve their process moving forward.