50 Shades of Grey, a Black and Blue Dress, and your Development Methodology

I recently noticed that the buzz on social media had just about subsided from the great commotion around the “50 Shades of Grey” film debut to be once again excited over a completely different set of hues.

It is indeed quite baffling to see how two individuals have two different interpretations of the same picture of a colored dress.  Naturally many explanations have popped up on the net and now everyone speaks freely and confidently of photography and neuro-optical terms such as “White-Balance”, “Color Constancy” and “Vision-Bias” and mainly of the illusive notion of perception.

Black or Gold?

A similar paradox of perception can be observed in organizations dealing with application and software development. If you ask several stakeholders of the same organization of their development methodology and most likely you will get as many answers as the number of stakeholders you ask. On the very wide methodology spectrum ranging from extreme waterfall to extreme agile, most companies are located somewhere in between those extremes.  Some will deem their methodology to be agile—just for the fact that the teams work in iterations and practice daily scrum. Others will deem it Waterfall—just for still keeping fully documented specifications.

The tints and hues of the methodology differ from one company to another. While within each company methodologies keep evolving and moving along the wide spectrum of practices. Large enterprises even find themselves dealing with many shades of methodologies being practiced simultaneously by the various departments and teams. Much like Escher’s Waterfall, when you look at your organization, its methodologies may look at times much like a waterfall and at times they look quite iterative as Agile practices suggest.

Is it Waterfall or Iterative

Regardless of the methodology you are using, if it is not managed and enforced properly it is bound to fail.

Efficient and effective application delivery requires a management tool to fit your shade of methodology. With much more than 50 shades of application lifecycle management techniques, it is quite a challenge to find a tool that matches your specific methodology with all its nuances and your particular line of business.

For this reason many organizations find HP Application Lifecycle Management\Quality Center to  be the best tool to accommodate their many shades of ALM. With its rich and extremely flexible customization means HP ALM\QC can be fashioned to depict the exact workflow and policies your organization chooses to follow. The moment your organization decides to modify the process and lean more toward agile - or maybe even become more entrenched in waterfall practices - HP ALM\QC can be easily adjusted to accommodate any such change.

Coming soon to a server near you

Moreover, with its various integration and synchronization means, HP ALM\QC can redeem ad-hoc silo systems that are being used by various teams from their isolation and hook those systems into the overall ALM workflow.

HP ALM\QC is a unique tool that adjusts itself to the particular methodology of the organization and does not enforce any particular shade of ALM.

HP ALM\QC works for you and not the other way around.

No matter what your shade of methodology is, If you haven’t tried HP ALM\QC yet – give it a shot and download it here.

[This post is a mirror post of the one I published on HP's Blog]