The Applications Handbook.pdf - Nexus Technologies Inc.

Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle ■ 5
This notion of integrated management and automation is
already established in disciplines such as mechanical engineering.
Planes and cars have cockpits and dashboards that indicate
the status and behavior of the vehicle. These trigger
corrective actions through dependent automated systems
(more fuel, a different angle to the rudders) the results of
which (greater speed, revised direction) are instantaneously
reflected in the cockpit’s management console.
Software engineering has not made as much progress integrating
management and automation capabilities. Part of this is a
result of inertia: IT organizations grow comfortable with legacy
practices and point tools, even as the systems and methods of
delivery grow more complex. But also, vendors have had difficulty
creating integrated solutions.
In the chapters that follow, we suggest ways companies can
take advantage of unified automation and management.
Mastering the True Application Lifecycle,
From Core to Complete
Clearly, the work from requirements through deployment—
what HP terms the core lifecycle—is critical. Failure here means
the application never comes into being, or it does so with poor
quality and at wildly inflated costs.
However, too often companies assume that by controlling the
core lifecycle, everything else falls into place. This approach
overlooks all that happens before requirements and after initial
deployment: portfolio planning, establishing enterprise technical
policy and governance, implementing operational responsiveness
and tuning, managing change, and finally retiring the
application.
In other words, this approach ignores the complete lifecycle, that
cradle-to-grave context whose effective execution is the true
challenge of any application’s success.