Astounding Project Success the recent use of application simulation technology. Software development organizations have been evolving their software development life cycles for years. With each evolution, improvements have been achieved but there been very few significant breakthroughs in the overall success of projects.
The major changes to project methodologies have tended towards the activities within the methodology becoming more iterative. From the original waterfall approach to Team Fusion and Team Fusion/OO to the Rational Unified Process (otherwise known as RUP) these approaches still don’t resolve a fundamental problem.
Even with multiple iterations in design and construction, most users don’t know what they really need until they see it first.
This makes it very difficult to address business requirements with timely appropriate implementations of technology.
In fact, many organizations today rely on coded prototypes to get user buy in. However, this is a very expensive approach. Another disadvantage is that often development teams are forced by budget and management expectations to deploy prototype code, which results in systems that are frequently unstable and cannot scale.
In addition, even with all the iterations, it is common to see that the most of the issues raised in the Quality Assurance Phase before deployment come from missing or mis-implemented requirements rather than from poorly constructed code.
In fact, according to studies by the Standish Group (www.standishgroup.com) and reported through various media and vendor outlets, true project success, defined by projects delivered on-time, within-budget, with the functionality required by the user base, remains below 20%.
Some other statistics include:
- 84% of all software projects fail due to lack of user involvement and poor requirements.
- 51% of projects are delivered late and over budget
- 54% of the defined features are delivered
- 45% of the delivered features are never used
There is now a solution to this problem. It has been used very effectively in many manufacturing industries before being tuned to software development. That solution is Application Simulation.
Most applications require complex access to data, data transformation, business logic, page flows and navigation as well as look and feel. Therefore, requirements definition practices such as html “click-throughs” and even coded prototypes have a difficult time of rendering a real representation of what a user might require.
In addition, requirements documents are always subject to some interpretation. IN fact, a well-defined specification can be given to 5 different developers and you will likely get 5 different results.
Application simulation, on the other hand, provides the ability for an entire application to be built in a simulation before any code is ever written. This simulation can now be built in 1/10 the time or less that coded prototypes might take. There is only one enterprise ready platform available today that can deliver this sort of capability and around 50% of Fortune 100 companies have already deployed it.
