Reinventing Lifecycle Management
Borland CTO Blake Stone says our application lifecycle management process is broken. Find out how to fix it.
by Nina Goldschlager

Posted October 22, 2003

Play the video Running time: 1 hour, 6 minutes, 15 seconds

Blake Stone CTO, Borland Software Corp.

Borland CTO Blake Stone told Enterprise Architect Summit attendees that we need to reinvent application lifecycle management because the process is "broken," and "has been for ages."

In his keynote address on October 13, 2003, Stone criticized the traditional "waterfall" model of lifecycle management, in which "software gets developed by a series of stages and hand-offs": Define, Design, Develop, Test, and Deploy. "This process was fundamentally broken from the beginning. It was never relevant," he said. "Nobody ever built software this way."

What's required, he said, is to look at the lifecycle stages as interlocking puzzle pieces in a circle. "They are tightly related to one another. They're all relevant, at all times." He said testing and deployment teams should be involved in the early stages of the process to prevent problems later.

But there's a "real hole" in the middle, Stone said. That hole is filled by the managers, who facilitate communication and help build a history showing how the project evolves over time. "This is our new way of thinking about things," he said.

Stone also cited big challenges for architects, one of which is keeping up with the complexity curve. "The traditional focus in dealing with complexity is to tackle it with technology," Stone said. This can be accomplished by compressing individual stages of the lifecycle, specifically by accelerating development and reusing solutions. But those efforts won't solve all the problems, he said. He emphasized the need to look at the overall lifecycle, in addition to individual stages. (Also see the FTPOnline Special Report on Lifecycle Management.)

Social problems also pose a challenge, Stone said. "Usually it's the people problems," as opposed to the technology problems, that doom a project, he said. He noted the availability of technology improvements that open communication channels and allow people to work together more efficiently. "This was a big awakening for me," he said.

Stone described how Borland is addressing these issues with its application lifecycle management tools. "Good software really lives forever," Stone said. "We have to recognize that the architecture we're putting in place right now is likely to live for a good, long time in our organization if we do our jobs right."

About the Author
Nina Goldschlager is managing editor of FTPOnline.