Mar 12, 2020 | Agile Codeless, Codeless, Wireframing
About
Agile Codeless is a software development life-Cycle *(SDLC) approach that embraces codeless authoring methods and tools to produce enterprise apps. Developed by NDMC Consulting over a decade of enterprise software projects, it removes the barriers that exist between IT and the Business when authoring enterprise applications software.
The challenges of developing software applications
A level of trial and error can be expected for any creative activity but the excessive risks of software authoring are born out in studies both in terms of slow time to market and burgeoning costs. The article ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think’ by HBR (November 2011) followed a survey of 1,471 IT projects with an average spend of $167m and found:
- The average overrun was 27%
- One in six projects studied experienced a cost overrun of over 200%.
- Almost 70% of black swan projects also overrun their schedules.
Though the pitfalls of software applications development are by now well documented the IT industry has been singularly unable to overcome them. But as globalization increases apace, business models change ever more rapidly and organizations seek to leverage ‘Big Data’, the need to reliably produce better applications right-first-time has never been more critical.
An unprecedented pace of change in business models is creating a need for more agile IT
For a hundred years management thinking has valued mechanization over creativity…
..but after decades of automation, the core business processes of organizations are pretty slick – that is until markets change and business models need to realign. Then concepts of operational excellence evangelized by management consultants sound hollow.
As the very structure of markets change, smaller, more nimble companies benefitting from closer ties to their customers, and a clearer understanding of their value, are able to steal a march on vendors 100 times their size.
Even global brands aren’t safe – new aggressors can emerge from a different industry altogether to take a big bite out of a market they see as fair game in an open, global market-place (such as retailers venturing into the car insurance market for example).
“Institutionally, the ability to be agile enough is the gut issue in leading an organization today.” James McNearney – CEO, Boeing
Organizations that could once survive without reviewing business models more than once a decade are now forced to re-assess annually. The new mantra of business excellence is agility – to create an enterprise that can adapt to always win in its most addressable markets.
Powering enterprise agility
Key to the drive for agility is the need to empower middle managers; people with the energy, skills and curiosity to question why processes work as they do and find new ways to distil customer value. Leaders are coming to realize that leadership at all levels of the enterprise is vital. This critical tier of ‘corporals’ demand systems and tools to understand and adapt their assets and resources to fit internal processes to the ever changing business landscape.
This is driving demand for a new tier of applications that harvest data from existing sources to create new applications that response to new situations (‘situational applications’) as they arise and align IT systems to better fit constantly evolving processes.
Releasing Innovation
Disparate silos of data across the enterprise – a known problem that has faced organizations for decades, but how do you fix it?
Services-Oriented Architecture is a term that describes the design and use of information services to support business needs; a coherent enterprise-wide method of organizing how computer systems present information to other systems so the data they manage can be accessed more easily without compromising systems performance or security. For business people, the major benefit of organizing information through SOA is the prospect that data held in disparate silos across the enterprise can be re-used to create new applications that produce smarter processes.
To consume Web Services requires applications able to bring data together while fashioning new data structures, web portals and forms-based applications to view, edit and update data.
Demand for these new applications increasingly comes from communities of workers that, while small in number, are essential to process innovation and creativity – things that create competitive advantage in the 21st century business world.
The conceived wisdom of building large lumbering enterprise applications for the majority at the expense of the few, no longer fits the reality of what these critical communities of information workers either need or expect. The high quality of software people now use in their homes and on their mobile phones has raised the bar of what business users expect. The digital native generation dismisses applications that require a manual or that ask them to live with inhospitable reporting tools.
To meet the demands of this new ‘consumerized’ user community, the only viable solution is to produce applications at a faster pace and at lower risk; getting new applications to market faster, at lower cost. This demand has led to the innovations found in the Agile Codeless methodology.
“Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong.”
Source: AIMS survey on information management, 2007
Delivering as Services Oriented Architecture
Services-Oriented Architecture is a term that describes the design and use of information services to support business needs; a coherent enterprise-wide method of organizing how computer systems present information to other systems so the data they manage can be accessed more easily without compromising systems performance or security.
For business people, the major benefit of organizing information through SOA is the prospect that data held in disparate silos across the enterprise can be re-used to create new applications that produce smarter processes.
To consume Web Services requires applications able to bring data together while fashioning new data structures, web portals and forms-based applications to view, edit and update data.
Demand for these new applications increasingly comes from communities of workers that, while small in number, are essential to process innovation and creativity – things that create competitive advantage in the 21st century business world.
The conceived wisdom of building large lumbering enterprise applications for the majority at the expense of the few, no longer fits the reality of what these critical communities of information workers either need or expect. The high quality of software people now use in their homes and on their mobile phones has raised the bar of what business users expect.
The digital native generation dismisses applications that require a manual or that ask them to live with inhospitable reporting tools. To meet the demands of this new consumerized user community, the only viable solution is to produce applications at a faster pace and at lower risk; getting new applications to market faster, at lower cost.
How Agile Codeless Works
Agile Codeless is a rapid method of designing and deploying situational applications for workgroups and teams. It’s codeless because applications are authored using a platform that supplies pre-formed building blocks of technology, negating the need to see or use programming code. The absence of code and script in design workshops is important because it removes the barriers between IT experts and business professionals responsible for scoping applications; probably because they are stakeholders and users of the app to be authored.
The ability to develop applications in near real-time (largely during workshops with users and stakeholders) not only makes applications ‘better-fit’ to the community of users and beneficiaries they’re intended for, but reduces the time, cost and risk of applications developments – all but removing testing, tuning and re-working costs.
Agile Codeless methods and tools dramatically reduce the skills needed for authoring applications which means that one individual can reasonably discharge the entire lifecycle. The fact that applications are authored ‘faster’ does not remove the need for quality gates or pre-qualification of the use-case, user needs and benefactor outcome expectations. Developments are by necessity heavily pre-scoped using formalized analysis methods that include:
- Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI) based job worth analysis
- Scorecarding
- SRPRS applications scoping
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enterprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.
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Mar 12, 2020 | Wireframing, Wireframing App
About
Wireframing is something quite new. A wireframe is a visual representation and skeletal framework of a web application. Wireframes are used to help applications designers, users and stakeholders to come together. Wireframing Apps (also known as ‘Wireframing Tools’) are a form of prototyping software tool used to support the creative process of producing applications.
Live Wireframing
Live wireframing is a modern Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) methodology for creating applications software developments that takes the activity of ‘bringing users, stakeholders and developers together on the same page. The key phases of Live Wireframing are:
- Scope
- Design and Deploy
- Operate
- Review
Live Wireframing has some unique characteristics. These include:
Use of Application Constructs; pre-defined structural page designs that adhere to a common lexicon of language that both IT and Users can understand. These include:
- Start Wizard
- Keynote
- Landing
- Highlights
- Workpage
- Data Entry (standard, wizard)
- Assembly
- Library
- Views, Previews and Maps
- Reports
- Users
- Share
- Export
- Meta
The need to cross the chasm between ‘IT’ and ‘the business’
According to PwC research from its 6th Annual Digital IQ survey of nearly 1,500 business and technology executives (2015, as the expectations of the business increase, IT’s ability to respond decreases. In their article ‘The New IT Platform: Bridging the Gap Between Business and IT,’ PwC argue that businesses are facing rapid change, technology-empowered
consumers and increased ease of access to cloud-based technologies.
Pressures for change is putting pressure on IT functions to evolve. Yet:
- Only 16% of Digital IQ respondents rate IT as “excellent” for its ability to manage business requirements to integrate digital capabilities into the core business
- 47% of technology spending is now outside of the CIO’s budget.
PwC concludes that, ‘IT needs to evolve its skills, update its operating model and institute more flexible architecture and technologies. The New IT Platform will serve as a bridge to bring the business and IT together.’ For me, this is what Live Wireframing was born to do.
How Live Wireframing works
Encanvas Live-Wireframe
LIVE-WIREFRAME™ is cloud-ready prototyping software designed to enable DevOps business analysts to orchestrate processes with new applications in near-real-time. The solution enables users and stakeholders to test a ‘live system’ with meaningful data. Once developed, DevOps teams can either deploy the solution on Encanvas AppFabric secure-cloud enterprise application platform, or create it using their preferred tools.
Here’s how it works:
Imagine walking into a workshop where business people are busy explaining to an analyst how their new app needs to work. Across the desk, is an analyst is busy crafting the application in near-real-time.
After an hour or so, the new app is online and ready for people to use. Does it sound a little far-fetched? Oh. (Awkward).
Because people have been creating solutions to their IT needs this way with encanvas since 2003.
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enteprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.
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Further reading:
[The New IT Platform: Bridging the Gap Between Business and IT] by PwC
Mar 12, 2020 | Low Code Development
What is Low Code development and why is it becoming popular in enterprise software development?
What is lo-no code software?
is a short-hand description for the adoption of enterprise low-code software development methods and tools used to displace traditional manual coding and waterfall IT project management methods.
Where it has come from
Low Code development is made possible by the evolution of cloud computing and, specifically, enterprise application-Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS) software platforms that include an abstraction layer to displace use of code.
How Low Code development works
Low Code development platforms remove the need for coding or scripting as part of the process of designing, deploying and operating enterprise software applications. This is made possible through ‘ready to configure’ building blocks automation and the use of wizards and design element property configuration tools that allow designers to specify the application design, logic and User Interface (UX) without needing to resort to programming.
Adoption drivers
Low Code software design has grown in popularity, serving the demands of citizen developers to displace spreadsheets and basic desktop apps (and documents) with secure and resilient online apps. Organizations have come to recognize the slow-pace of software development resulting from the use of manual programming of applications. Low Code sotware becoms the logical progression of the enteprise computing art.
While low-code applications reduce the amount of programming required to author an application, no-code solutions remove the need for programming completely, using data integrations to facilitate the embedding of third-party tools and data sources.
Codeless software, like Encanvas, is software that removes the need for programming AND the visibility of code or script in the authoring process. This helps users and stakeholders to participate in software developments and removes the barrier that exists between ‘IT’ and ‘the business.’
Is Low Code development a threat to the programming discipline?
Some IT industry commentators argue that low-code software represents a step towards the computer authoring of software applications and the eradication of the software programming discipline that employs thousands of people around the world. In reality, a Low Code development platform removes the tedious and mundane software development tasks (like specifying buttons or creating database forms) that generally software programmers don’t want to spend their time doing. They will normally include data integrations to allow advanced programming components (like DLLs, algorithms, Jscript data visualizations, and artificial intelligence etc.) to be embedded into the lo-no code design and operational framework.
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enterprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.
Further reading
Wikipedia page on Business Intelligence.
Above And Beyond Business Intelligence eBook written by Ian C. Tomlin
Beyond Business Intelligence book by Barry Devlin
Marketwatch global market report on business intelligence. Download sample report at kennethresearch.com
Gartner Market Share report, 2018
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Mar 12, 2020 | SDLC, Software Development
What is software development?
About
According to Wikipedia ‘software development’ is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. It’s a reasonable description. At Encanvas, because we use no-lo software development tools and methods, the need to program or de-bug becomes irrelevant. We therefore describe it as – ‘The process of scoping, designing, deploying, documenting, testing, and tuning software applications.’
Software development lifecycle management
Over the years there have been several popular methods of developing software. These are articulated by the lifecycle a development takes from initial conception to completion, and beyond. We summarise these here.
Waterfall
As the term suggests, with waterfall development, a series of software developers (normally using different tools) are tasked with performing blocks of development. These activities are supervised by a project leader who sets out the development plan. Often, developers will disappear for days until the next project review meeting. This approach used to be the most common, particularly when the need to use different tools (demanding the skills of different developers) meant there was no other way.
Agile / Scrum
The existence of more versatile cloud software development environments has made it possible for agile software development to happen. The underpinned principle of agile development is that small teams, meeting regularly (in a scrum), agreeing what needs to be done, sprinting to get them produced in a day, then reviewing progress speeds up software development considerably. Unfortunately, this step forward in the software development approach does little to eradicate the project overheads and risks associated with manual coding.
Agile Codeless with Live Wireframing
Use of codeless (requires developers to no longer see or use code) Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) has made it possible for software developments to be managed by one person from start to end. The key design role is performed normally by someone with business analyst skills, as appreciating what needs to be created – and why – becomes the greater risk to project failure. This has led to the ability of software development to happen in workshops, in near-real-time. At the term suggests, live wireframing focuses on rapidly developing a live wireframe ‘prototype’ of a solution and ‘failing fast.’ Through the use of an integrated development environment, it’s possible to de-risk projects by iterating designs at a very low cost.
The risks of software development
Software development is known to be a hugely wasteful process.
A Harvard Business Review article article ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think’ published in November 2011 uncovered that, followed a survey of 1,471 IT projects with an average spend of $167m:
- The average overrun was 27%
- One in six of the projects studied was a black swan, with a cost overrun of 200%.
- Almost 70% of black swan projects also overrun their schedules.
This level of performance has changed little in the intervening period. So, why are software development projects so inconsistent in their delivery? There are a number of factors:
A lack of clarity of what needs building
Specifying how an application should work – the process it must fulfill, the aspirational needs of stakeholders, user interface, the logic rules, data integration, and processing, etc. – is complex. Working with stakeholders unsure of what they need, and struggling to visualize how it will work for them, makes it even more difficult.
A lack of surety in outcomes and RoI
Calculating a Return-on-Investment It’s hard to envision ‘how well’ a software development will work, and the level of influence the application will have in improving the process.
The complexity of the software development project process
When multiple individuals are working on the same project using different software development tools, it’s difficult to keep everyone on the same page and keep developments on-track. Even when projects manage this, the consequence of using a blend of development tools means that a small change to one aspect of development can have a big knock-on effect. For example, changes to the database structure can demand changes to front-end forms, requests for reports can expose shortcomings in data designs, etc.
The challenges of manual coding and scripting
Anyone that’s ever tried their hand at coding or scripting knows that it’s a slow and detailed process. When code is created manually, there’s always the risk that errors will be made. Worse still, there is a risk of malware being introduced or intellectual property loss. These risks demand that applications are heavily tested before they are released. This costs a lot of time and money to do. Any changes result in a new wave of developments.
When ‘customers’ change their minds
It’s not uncommon for users and stakeholders of a software development to change their minds over what’s needed. When this happens, it can significantly delay or even de-rail developments.
integration and data quality issues
Few applications function in isolation. Normally they need to take data from third-party systems or deposit it somewhere. The quality of data and the challenges of integration can take 30 to 45 percent of the project-spend. When data is poor, the RoI of projects can reduce or be completely removed. Data quality can make software developments redundant.
Platform versioning issues
When an application is used by a community of users or customers and they request changes to be made over time, this can result in development teams to have to support more than one version of their software. Unless some pre-planning goes into how platform versioning is managed, it can result in a long tail of code management overheads.
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enteprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Mason Alexander is a senior consultant specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by implementing enterprise software platforms that improve data visibility, process agility; and organizational learning – creating an enterprise that learns and adapts faster. He writes on subjects of change management, organizational design, rapid development applications software, and data science. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile.
Further reading
Mar 11, 2020 | SDLC, Software Development
What is System Development Life-cycle (SDLC)?
About SDLC
In systems engineering, information systems, and software engineering, the systems development lifecycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life-cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system.
Why SDLC matters
Creating software applications is a high-risk activity. The approach adopted by development teams has a significant impact on the likelihood of project success. The principal outcomes of an effective software development lifecycle (SDLC) model are:
On-time delivery and achieving the optimal time to market
Speed to market is a major influence on RoI when software is delivering customer value. Delivering software development projects on-time and hopefully, before time, is a major win of effective software development approaches.
Usability and quality of ‘the product’
Like any other ‘product’, the quality of the outcome, how easy it is to use, how seamlessly it integrates, all these things impact on customer experience and stakeholder perceptions. You can build software ‘well’ and you can build it WELL.
Security and retention of intellectual property
There’s always a risk that intellectual property is lost during software development, or data security is compromised when software applications are used. When these things DON’T HAPPEN, it’s a big success for software development project leaders.
Efficiency of the development capability
Imagine the people, tools, and methods used to make software applications as an engine. The performance of the ‘engine’ and its ability to produce apps might appear effective and functional, but how does its performance compare to other ‘engines’? When considering the effectiveness of methods used to create applications, it’s easy to ignore the comparative performance of solutions when most would be happy enough to just get software delivered on-time and on-budget.
RoI and on-budget performance
For most project sponsors, delivering a system development on-budget -that creates a solution to a business problem that produces the scoped Return-on-Investment (RoI) – is, well, almost an aspirational dream.
The reason the bar is generally set so low is that history is littered with software development failures. Expectations are low!
A Harvard Business Review article article ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think’ published in November 2011 uncovered that, followed a survey of 1,471 IT projects with an average spend of $167m:
- The average overrun was 27%
- One in six of the projects studied was a black swan, with a cost overrun of 200%.
- Almost 70% of black swan projects also overrun their schedules. This level of performance has changed little in the intervening period.
Summary of system development challenges that effective Software Development Lifecycles (SDLCs) can overcome
This level of performance has changed little in the intervening period. So, why are software development projects so inconsistent in their delivery? There are a number of factors:
A lack of clarity of what needs building
Specifying how an application should work – the process it must fulfill, the aspirational needs of stakeholders, user interface, the logic rules, data integration, and processing, etc. – is complex. Working with stakeholders unsure of what they need, and struggling to visualize how it will work for them, makes it even more difficult.
A lack of surety in outcomes and RoI
Calculating a Return-on-Investment It’s hard to envision ‘how well’ a software development will work, and the level of influence the application will have in improving the process.
The complexity of the software development project process
When multiple individuals are working on the same project using different software development tools, it’s difficult to keep everyone on the same page and keep developments on-track. Even when projects manage this, the consequence of using a blend of development tools means that a small change to one aspect of development can have a big knock-on effect. For example, changes to the database structure can demand changes to front-end forms, requests for reports can expose shortcomings in data designs, etc.
The challenges of manual coding and scripting
Anyone that’s ever tried their hand at coding or scripting knows that it’s a slow and detailed process. When code is created manually, there’s always the risk that errors will be made. Worse still, there is a risk of malware being introduced or intellectual property loss. These risks demand that applications are heavily tested before they are released. This costs a lot of time and money to do. Any changes result in a new wave of developments.
When ‘customers’ change their minds
It’s not uncommon for users and stakeholders of a software development to change their minds over what’s needed. When this happens, it can significantly delay or even de-rail developments.
Integration and data quality issues
Few applications function in isolation. Normally they need to take data from third-party systems or deposit it somewhere. The quality of data and the challenges of integration can take 30 to 45 percent of project-spend. When data is poor, the RoI of projects can reduce or be completely removed. Data quality can make software developments redundant.
Platform versioning issues
When an application is used by a community of users or customers and they request changes to be made over time, this can result in development teams to have to support more than one version of their software. Unless some pre-planning goes into how platform versioning is managed, it can result in a long tail of code management overheads.
Popular SDLC Methods
Over the years there have been several popular methods of developing software. These are articulated by the lifecycle a development takes from initial conception to completion, and beyond. We summarise these here.
Waterfall
As the term suggests, with waterfall development, series of software development, normally using different tools, are tasked with performing blocks of development that stream down from a project leader who lays out the plan. Often, developers will disappear for days until the next project review meeting. This approach used to be the most common, particularly when the need to use different tools (demanding the skills of different developers) means there was no other way.
Agile / Scrum
The existence of more versatile cloud software development environments has made it possible for agile software development to happen. The underpinned principle of agile development is that small teams, meeting regularly (in a scrum), agreeing what needs to be done, sprinting to get them produced in a day, then reviewing progress speeds up software development considerably. Unfortunately, this step forward in the software development approach does little to eradicate the project overheads and risks associated with manual coding.
Agile Codeless with Live Wireframing
The use of codeless requires developers to no longer see or use code. Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) make it possible for software developments to be managed by one person from start to end. The key design responsibility falls on someone with business analyst skills who has a deep appreciation of what needs to be created. This has led to the ability for software developments to happen in workshops, in near-real-time. At the term suggests, live wireframing focuses on rapidly developing a live wireframe ‘prototype’ of a solution and ‘failing fast.’ Through the use of an integrated development environment, it’s possible to de-risk projects by iterating designs at a very low cost.
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no-code (codeless) enterprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to install and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Erica Tomlin is a senior consultant specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by implementing enterprise software platforms that improve data visibility, process agility; and organizational learning – creating an enterprise that learns and adapts faster. She writes on subjects of change management, organizational design, rapid development applications software, and data science. She can be contacted via her LinkedIn profile.
Further reading
Mar 11, 2020 | Application Development Software, Software Development
An introduction to our application development software guide
Introduction
Encanvas is an enterprise software company dedicated to the discipline of codeless applications software development. Application Development Software computing platform used to design, deploy and operate software applications. The best-known use case for application platform technologies is found in the enterprise (so-called ‘Enterprise Application Platform’). Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live‘) is an example of Application Development Software.
The Need for Application Development Software in the Enterprise
To deliver their customer values and orchestrate their business processes, organizations much adopt Application Development Software to provide an interface between workers and computer systems (human-to-machine-interfacing-applications) and between computers (machine-to-machine-interfacing-applications). Perhaps unsurprisingly, some processes require both human and machine interfaces.
Moving Application Development Software to the Cloud
Since 2007, the enterprise computing industry has been progressively leveraging cloud computing technologies to make Application Development Software more accessible and available to user communities. Use of cloud hosting applications has made it possible for applications to serve markets and users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
One of the challenges of porting applications to the cloud has been the risk of data loss. Data security has become an increasing concern to organizations because of their greater reliance on data to continue business operations. Additionally, the increased compliance risks of processing personally identifiable information (PII) have made organizations more concerned about the security risks of cloud-deployed applications. Nevertheless, most application platforms today are deployed on cloud computing platforms as an applications-Platform-as-a-Service (aPaaS).
The need for greater agility in IT systems, together with the rising influence of operational departments on enterprise software buying decisions, has led to the rise in application platforms that allow non-programmers to author applications. So-called ‘Low-Code’ or ‘Codeless’ applications reduce or remove the need to see or use programming code or script in the design, deployment and operational phases of the Software Development Life-Cycle (SDLC).
About Encanvas
Encanvas is an enterprise software company that specializes in helping businesses to create above and beyond customer experiences.
From Low Code to Codeless
Better than code-lite and low-code, we created the first no code (codeless) enteprise application platform to release creative minds from the torture of having to code or script applications.
Live Wireframe
Use Encanvas in your software development lifecycle to remove the barrier between IT and the business. Coding and scripting is the biggest reason why software development has been traditionally unpredictable, costly and unable to produce best-fit software results. Encanvas uniquely automates coding and scripting. Our live wireframing approach means that business analysts can create the apps you need in workshops, working across the desk with users and stakeholders.
AppFabric
When it comes to creating apps to create a data culture and orchestrate your business model, there’s no simpler way to instal and operate your enterprise software platform than AppFabric. Every application you create on AppFabric adds yet more data to your single-version-of-the-truth data insights. That’s because, we’ve designed AppFabric to create awesome enterprise apps that use a common data management substrate, so you can architect and implement an enterprise master data management plan.
Customer Data Platform
Encanvas supplies a private-cloud Customer Data Platform that equips businesses with the means to harvest their customer and commercial data from all sources, cleanse and organize it, and provide tooling to leverage its fullest value in a secure, regulated way. We provide a retrofittable solution that bridges across existing data repositories and cleanses and organizes data to present a useful data source. Then it goes on to make data available 24×7 in a regulated way to authorized internal stakeholders and third parties to ensure adherence to data protection and FCA regulatory standards.
Encanvas Secure&Live
Encanvas Secure and Live (‘Secure&Live’) is a High-Productivity application Platform-as-a-Service. It’s an enterprise applications software platform that equips businesses with the tools they need to design, deploy applications at low cost. It achieves this by removing coding and scripting tasks and the overheads of programming applications. Unlike its rivals, Encanvas Secure&Live is completely codeless (not just Low-Code), so it removes the barriers between IT and the business. Today, you just need to know that it’s the fastest (and safest) way to design, deploy and operate enterprise applications.
Learn more by visiting www.encanvas.com.
The Author
Ian Tomlin is a management consultant and strategist specializing in helping organizational leadership teams to grow by telling their story, designing and orchestrating their business models, and making conversation with customers and communities. He serves on the management team of Encanvas and works as a virtual CMO and board adviser for tech companies in Europe, America and Canada. He can be contacted via his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter.
Further reading
