Agile, Agile, Agile… - Part 1
We (Rolta) recently annouced a partnership with Rally. Why? Because Agile makes you more productive. It will help you succeed! One such press release was in Tech Rockies and all 201 press releases are available as well. I thought I’d take some time to blog my thoughts about Agile over the next few blog entries.
In this series of blog entries, the goal is to help you, the reader understand why Agile SOA will make your efforts successful. Service-orientation / SOA is not best done in a huge waterfall effort. Long, big projects are killers especially in tough economic times. The quicker you can show success, the quicker you’ll win those new projects, get more business, save money, or whatever your goals may be. The Agile process allows for quick wins through quick turns. Like in the retail business, quick turns are good! Quick turns will give you quick feedback and allows you to change as your requirements come together or change. It’s also important to know that our approach is a best of breed approach to SOA. In other words, you don’t need to pick an entire technology stack day one – rather iPerspective gives you the necessary components of the stack to get you going today.
Agile is a development methodology that’s not RAD, not Extreme Programming (XP) or anything like that…it involves releases of the entire piece of software through iterations. The whole idea is to allow the business to work with IT, to see the results, provide feedback, etc. You see a couple of the important terms above – quick turns and quick feedback. Traditional SOA has been done in a waterfall method – there’s no value in re-writing things for the sake of re-writing. In other words, there’s no direct value in SOA – the value is in “x” – something else. With SOA you get to re-use existing assets, but if you don’t need to reuse anything…it would be of no value. SOA might allow a company to do some new things – like mashups, application to application integration or a new workflow.
The ability to rapidly modify service offerings is becoming a key to success in today’s turbulent economy. Many companies are turning to SOA to help their business reduce development effort and achieve agility, but implementing SOA effectively has proved a daunting challenge all its own. How can today’s IT managers and CIOs realistically propose SOA and quickly deliver benefits without risking their jobs?
This series will explain why historic SOA implementations have failed, how you can benefit from innovative software that fundamentally transforms the complexity of implementing SOA to an “instant” task, and how an Agile, iterative approach can deliver rapid ROI for your business and ultimately lower total cost of ownership. In a time where budgets can be cut at a moment’s notice, this paper aims to ensure you derive value from your SOA initiatives in weeks and become the “hero” for your business.
Introduction
First let’s talk about our Agile SOA methodology and then will share some case studies on how organizations generate revenues quickly, get feedback from users, and ultimately save time and money. Some people save money by using having rapid feedback with end users. Others use it to quickly demonstrate what can be done with the services and then leave it to their B2B customers to develop their own UI when customers ask for functionality beyond their out of the box UI. So they save money by not having to do the UI enhancements or workflow development themselves – rather they drove it out to their customers.
First background on SOA will be provided, we’ll talk about Agile and how it works, then we’ll talk about how you can use Agile and iPerspective to give you quick turns, which will result in quick wins. This is our BeTteR process (build, try, retry)…so let’s get started.
Topics in this series include:
· Introduction to Service Orientation
· Agile, Agile, Agile
· Quick Turns (with iPerspective)
· BeTteR process
· Build, Try, Revise
In this entry, I’ll cover the Introduction to Service Orientation…
Slaying Daemons and Ghosts
We all have those daemons and ghosts that keep us up at night…hopefully not every night, but it happens once in a while. What is that keeps you up at night? I’ve been in business for myself since I was about 10 years old. From delivering newspapers and collecting weekly to starting TUSC, which what was a $50M business in 2006. I can assure you that cash flow became a concern when I was 10 – people didn’t answer their door when I rang the bell – for their $1.40 a week newspaper…and when you’re collecting $50M in revenue, DSO (days sales outstanding) increases. Each day equates to $140k and at 10% interest, that’s a net cost of $14k in interest per DSO…that adds up to a lot of money in no time! So if you can reduce your DSO, you’re making money! Cash flow is a daemon for most every business.
Has your firm cut “fat” and then “muscle” and you’re now into the bone? What’s next? I’ve been there! Everyone picks up more and more and everyone’s “happy” to have a job – as they say “it beats the alternative” – right? It does, but the more you can do, the better off you’ll be.
Then there is the uncertainty and risk of it all. When will we hit the bottom? If we knew that, we could do a perfect pro-forma and figure out exactly what to cut and when…but it’s not that simple is it? So how do you survive? When will it turn? Are we at the bottom now? Obviously the more you can save and the faster you can save it…the longer you can hold out before you have to make any cuts. The more you cut, the longer it will take you to recover. The greatest time of opportunity is when the market recovers. That’s when there is a shortage of firms in business and that’s when the profit margins are at their highest. You’ll far exceed your losses in gains – but only if you survive. So it’s a tightrope that we all balance.
The faster you can learn from your users, the more you stay ahead of things, the more you’ll be ahead of the curve. How can you accomplish this? Quick wins! If you can support an Agile enterprise, it will streamline your enterprise.
How long does it take you from the time you have a great new idea until you actually see it? With Agile, the maximum time is 2 times your iteration time. Our iteration time is 2 weeks, so the maximum time is 4 weeks. More about this shortly.
The bottom line is that long projects won’t fly when you’re trying to save money – quick wins are the key!
What keeps you up at night?
· Cash flow in a declining world economy?
· Efficiency: doing more after cutting into the “muscle?”
· Uncertainty and risk?
· Surviving until the recovery
Positioning for the recovery
· Learning faster, better -> ahead of the curve
· Infrastructure and processes to reliably support an agile, streamlined enterprise
Service-oriented Solutions
This is a quote from Gartner, #G00163409:
“Most midsize and large software projects target a service-oriented software model. Service-oriented applications are modular, and the modules (services and clients) are loosely coupled, shareable and distributable, and are encapsulated behind separately documented programmatic interfaces. Support of such architecture requires a multifunctional, underlying application infrastructure technology often assembled by users from products of potentially different vendors. Some users prefer a best-of-breed approach to selecting their enabling technologies, although this approach requires users to act as system integrators (SIs) in assembling the end-to-end enabling platform for the project.”
In the past we were very technology oriented. I’m sure you remember terms like “re-engineering” – it’s better to fit the business process into the technology – not really, but that’s what we thought at the time. Companies moved to COTS (comes off the shelf) implementations because it was better for them to purchase software than it was for them to write it. Sure, you might ask, who would write a database software package? I can’t tell you how many order entry or ERP applications I wrote over my career. People customized Oracle Applications to no end in the early days. Then we learned that practice was a bad idea – most of us learned the hard way. I was on a project in the early 90s where the ERP customization had been in progress for years. When the next version of Oracle Apps came out, “customizations” killed everyone.
Now we’re service-oriented. Someone recently said to me “this SOA thing isn’t anything new.” That’s true, it’s really not – someone else summed it up very well – “SOA is really just a bunch of best practices of best practices.” In other words, just because you put an SOA in place doesn’t mean you can’t screw it up. In my early SOA efforts, governance (i.e. operational excellence) wasn’t discussed, so we learned those best practices the hard way. SOA can easily put components of the architecture right into the heartbeat of a company. I recently talked to one of our DBAs who mentioned that a customer had all of their services running through one DB box that was processing 3500 transactions per second…therefore , they could afford ZERO downtime. That’s risky! I’d venture to say that’s not a best practice. And they are an SOA shop…
Service orientation gives you an open API to your business, data, and business processes. Platform independent, technology independent…i.e. we’re not technology oriented any more…
SOA provides you with an open standard API to your entire business. That’s service-orientation!
Technology-oriented (then)
· Traditional business applications – “one-size-fits-all”
· Business processes created to utilize technology
· “Re-engineering”
Service-oriented (now)
· Standard information and process “services” that can be mixed and matched to solve business problems in a standard, reliable, flexible and efficient way
· Technology created to serve business purposes
· Business Intelligence, Business Process Management
Benefits of Service-Oriented IT
The benefits of service orientation are real. Imagine having an open standard API for your entire business. Any system can communicate with any other system – transparently. So rather than moving and copying data throughout your organization, you can get the data from the system of record (single source of the truth) when you need it. Traditionally we have replicated data throughout our organizations. Copies of data everywhere – i.e. stale data throughout. I was at a government facility the other day and they said – “we have access to yesterday’s information, but not today’s.” They are making decisions about people’s lives with day old data!
Do you want to invent the wheel? Do you want to re-write your systems? Of course not. You have years of development in your existing business logic. In fact, in many organizations the person who wrote the original code has been gone for 10 years now. It’s a black box. Or…you might have a packaged application (i.e. COTS) that you don’t have the source code for. And nearly every COTS provider makes it clear that if you modify their source code, you won’t be supported. They also make it clear that if you put data into their database without going through their APIs, you will not be supported.
Well the good news is that unlike historical architectures that required a re-write to migrate to them, SOA allows you to re-use your existing data and business logic – i.e. wrap it. This is a first!
This sounds like a great concept, but as you study SOA, you’ll quick say that you don’t want to expose everything you have today as a service – i.e. programs are too granular (i.e. fine grained) to be useful in their raw form. Composite services allow you to combine services into a larger (i.e. course grain) service. BPEL processes allow you to orchestrate services – i.e. put workflow around services – even granular services via RMI (which is fast). The bottom line is that some people refer to the reuse of your existing logic as “Legacy modernization.” Clearly this is efficiency for your organization. The benefits of legacy moderation are that you’ll have no new spend for these services, no new training is required ($, comfort, user error – i.e. you get to program in whatever core competency you have today); and it will meet your regulatory requirements.
If you implement a service orientation using Agile, you’re able to accommodate changes quickly! If you remember programming 101, it’s best to make one change, then test it out fully rather than changing 20 things and trying to get your program to work. Well SOA is the same way – rather than developing 20 services at once, you can use Agile with short iterations and releases.
Wouldn’t it also be able to build services as you prioritize them – i.e. as the business is changing? It’s similar to Just in Time (JIT) inventory. This is Just in Time Web Services!
If you can put some predictability in your service orientation efforts, you’ll be able to ultimately reduce your risk. It’s pretty simple really! This strategy will position you for the recovery by building your corporate knowledge one service at a time…not literally one service per iteration, but you get the idea. This provides for continuous improvement. Services will be used and re-used! This process encourages and support information sharing!
Reuse of assets is pretty cool and Agile makes it fast to see the results.
Consistency across enterprise
· Single source of truth
· Reuse and efficiency
· “Legacy modernization”
· Agile – accommodates change
· One vs. many access points
· Predictability -> reduce risk!
Position for the recovery by building corporate knowledge
· Continuous improvement based on multi-use
· Encourages and supports information sharing
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
There are a lot of components to a complete SOA stack. The good news is that you don‘t have to build your entire stack day one! You likely already have your computing and network components. You likely already have your business applications. SOA gets built around everything you have today – even the existing services. SOA is an architecture, not a product you buy. We have more information on the stack, building the stack, governance, and more…so if you‘re interested in learning more about the stack and how these things fit together, please send us an email or give us a call – we would be happy to talk to you more about this.
The good news is iPerspective either fits into an existing stack or we give you a complete stack…it‘s your call.
The SOA Train is Here!
Gartner has something they call the hype cycle. It’s a cycle that they say every new technology goes through. People get excited about new technology very quickly. Take Twitter for example – I’m thinking it has to be at the top of the hype cycle – and will soon crash. Once people get beyond the hype and get back to reality, the technology tends to hit a new low, then slowly rebuilds. Depending on what part of the curve you’re comfortable implementing a new technology will depend on your interest in SOA or any other technology. If you’re an early adaptor, you missed the curve for SOA…but cloud computing might be more up your alley right now. SOA has passed the hype cycle and is into the safe zone. So at this point you’re not an early adaptor – nor a late adaptor. Just like Goldilocks said in the “3 Little Bears” said – “this bed is just right…” You time might be now.
Internal sales – we’re past the early adaptor stage – it’s time for others now…
SOA Utilization
IDC took a look at services within organizations that were using SOA to figure out what categories their services fell into. If we focus on a few service categories, we quickly notice that 58% of the services either wrap an existing interface, query or update data or perform data transformation. We’re going to come back to our technology that supports our methodology in a minute, but the circled categories are easily created using iPerspective (our technology). You’ll get to see more about this in a minute.
The circled ways companies are using services are what iPerspective does immediately. It’s 58% of the picture out of the box. We have other things like security services, we can do such as event notification, etc.
SOA Is Alive and Well!
The Burton group did a great job of exciting the SOA world and creating viral hype for the community by saying SOA is dead – brilliant! But…it’s not dead. Long live services – but monolithic, top-down, waterfall SOA projects…yes, those are dead. Who can afford to wait 2 years to see the results of something you start today? Nobody can. The business changes far too much in 2 years. In times like today, 2 months is too long!
As I discussed above, legacy modernization – i.e. using your existing assets is key. There is a shortage of skills and talent within most every organization today. Most adaptors of SOA said this was a challenge to support a HUGE SOA initiative. Again, our technology that backs up our methodology, iPerspective, answers that challenge by automatically taking care of complexity and removing the need to know new programming languages and paradigms in order to exploit the advantages of SOA.
SOA is not dead, but as I mentioned above, SOA doesn’t give you ROI…and services are alive – just not the big stuff…
Monolithic, tops-down, waterfall approaches have not worked:
· Multi-year
· No significant ROI
· Cultural turmoil
Burton Group: SOA is dead!?
· According to Burton Group in 2008, SOA initiatives have stalled out in some cases:
o The techies have not been able to explain to the business units why they should adopt a better attitude about sharing and collaboration — which is the fundamental cultural shift required for SOA to succeed. The pervasive attitude is “What’s in it for me?”
· No! Service-oriented is very much alive!!
· iPerspective automates and requires no new skills!
Comparison of SOA Approaches
The TUSC approach or methodology empowers rich customer interactions through Agile SOA
We believe that
· SOA should be delivered in days, not months or years.
· Agility is the ability to be flexible, quickly – this is critical in both your approach and technology benefits
· Simplicity and delivering rapid value are paramount
· There is a better way to deliver SOA Today.
· Traditional and technology-oriented approaches take too long, require the business to wait as it changes, lacks agility, etc. Agile is by far the most productive development methodology I’ve ever experienced. We use it for all of our internal product development.
Our approach is iterative, small projects, quick ROI…
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