Today's economic outlook presents both interesting problems and opportunities for companies.
The practice of belt tightening has forced burgeoning trends to the forefront of product development, while other trends have been in the making for a while.
As product development teams have been forced to streamline their processes and do more with less, a diverse set of trends are proving to be efficient, cost effective means of doing more with less -- remote access for diagnostics, monitoring, and support; product line re-engineering; geographically distributed, but integrated, design and development teams; and, more sophisticated test strategies.
Exploring & Expanding Remote Access Capabilities
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Costs and market pressures are causing more and more companies to explore or expand remote access capabilities. Remote access enables the diagnosis of symptoms, problems, or other issues; the active monitoring of performance, work flow, capacity, availability, and other aspects; and, the ability to provide guidance or support through access to the end user's experience in "real time" (through shared views and data) - all without having to be co-located with the system, product, or user.
The benefits are clear. The end user receives faster problem resolution, timely assistance, has less down time, and realizes reduced support costs.
The manufacturer or vendor also realizes reduced support costs, has a greater ability to leverage centralized, in-house expertise to resolve issues and provide support, and, perhaps most importantly, enjoys improved customer satisfaction.
Product Line Re-engineering
Product line re-engineering is essentially the concept that new products can be built by packaging and leveraging existing core assets, specifically re-designed to support reuse.
Product line re-engineering also prescribes the range of allowed variability across related products which greatly helps streamline product development and product support.
Rather than developing completely new software for various related products, this approach is the embodiment of doing more with less and has demonstrated significant efficiency gains — both in productivity and time, across a family of products.
Leveraging Core Expertise
The phenomenon of integrated, geographically distributed development teams has been an accelerating trend for the past few years.
The driving force behind this trend has largely been the goal of reduced R&D costs through better use of existing distributed engineering centers. With increased global competition driving companies to re-visit global product development strategies, it is imperative that companies find ways to incorporate and more effectively leverage their capabilities and advantages.
Until recently, most global development has been "stove-piped" with different products developed in different places.
In the past, shallow and incomplete strategies to deploy and integrate global product development organizations have largely defeated the goal of reduced costs and squandered much greater potential advantages at many companies.
It is important to recognize that due to acquisitions and other forces, inside of a single company, the various product development groups often have fundamentally different operating dynamics in terms of culture, capabilities, processes, tools and technologies, etc. Additionally, many have significant differences in process "as written" and "as performed," and also have unique interactions with other facets of the organization.
Automated Testing, Greater Efficiency
A final product development trend we have recently experienced is the increased use of software test automation programs and continuous integration processes.
Most companies typically treat software testing as the last hurdle before a product is released. And worse, it is commonplace to see testing squeezed or reduced because of budget and schedule pressures, frequently as a result of upstream inefficiencies in upstream development processes.
An effective approach to combat this problem, and have better initial product quality with overall savings in time and costs is to create an upfront comprehensive testing strategy that addresses unit, regression and integration testing, continuous builds, and creating a test frameworks that can help streamline system testing.
This strategy identifies where automated testing techniques will yield the greatest overall benefits and integrates it directly into the development process.
Automated testing allows for more reliable, repeatable results. The implementation of an effective automated test program can help:
Reduce the amount of manual testing performed thereby reducing the development schedule and budget
Gain greater efficiency in the software development process since automated tests run earlier in the development process and can resolve issues at lower cost and time impacts.
Identify regressions quickly, with less time between defect insertion and identification.
Increase overall coverage of the tests by executing them unattended, 24 hours a day.
Achieve greater consistency and repeatability of testing.
Facilitate performance and stress testing.
A well thought out test strategy is essential when introducing automated testing into a product development organization. It requires upfront investment and proper due diligence to ensure it is a fit for the organization. Without proper planning, it can be an expensive and frustrating endeavor for everyone.