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nALM: Tools and Tips

Kishore Bhamidipati (kishore.bhamidipati@sap.com) is an enterprise software products professional with experience defining and driving product and marketing strategy at large companies like Oracle, Mercury, and HP, as well as startups. At SAP, Kishore is responsible for defining and driving the global marketing messaging and strategy for the IT-oriented SAP solution extensions.

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by Kishore Bhamidipati, SAP

Would You Build a House Without a Blueprint?Managing the Requirements and Design Phases of Your Application Projects

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is a

popular phrase among developers, administrators,

system architects, and IT system operators these

days, since IT systems are becoming more com-

plex and heterogeneous, and development efforts

are touching various points in the landscape.

In a previous SAPinsider article,� I provided a

holistic overview of ALM and discussed the role

it plays in helping the business of IT run more

smoothly. I also touched on the six phases of an

application’s life cycle and discussed the solu-

tion extensions offered by SAP that are targeted

to ALM.

In this article, I will dive deeper into the first

two ALM phases — Requirements and Design —

and uncover how the SAP Enterprise Modeling

application by IDS Scheer helps organizations

address the challenges that each of these phases

presents. I’ll also take you through the tool’s role

and benefits in two specific scenarios: developing

new SAP applications and upgrading existing

implementations.

Beginning the ALM Cycle: Requirements and DesignAs I noted in my previous article, application

lifecycle management is divided into six phases,

based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

standard: Requirements, Design, Build and Test,

Deploy, Operate, and Optimize (see Figure 1 on

the next page). Let’s look more closely at the

first two phases.

� See “8 Must-Have Tools for Your ALM Toolkit” by Kishore Bhamidipati in the April-June 20�0 issue of SAPinsider (sapinsider.wispubs.com).

Gather and Document Business Needs in the Requirements PhaseDuring this phase, business analysts define the

needs and requirements� for a project, a process

that includes:

Requirements analysis, which is critical to a

development project’s success, refers to the

tasks involved in determining the needs or

conditions for a new or altered product, while

taking into account the (sometimes conflict-

ing) requirements of stakeholders, including

end users. Requirements must be documented,

actionable, measurable, testable, related to

identified business needs or opportunities, and

sufficiently defined for system design.

Requirements management involves identi-

fying, eliciting, documenting, analyzing, tracing,

prioritizing, and agreeing on requirements.

It also includes monitoring changes and

communicating them to relevant stakeholders.

Requirements management is a continuous

process throughout the life of a project.

Blueprint and Model in the Design PhaseIn the Design phase, which is closely linked to

the Requirements phase, business analysts create

a blueprint for the application or solution by

selecting processes and scenarios to implement.

2 Requirements are capabilities that a project outcome (a finished product or service) must have. They can be functional or non-functional. Functional requirements are action-oriented tasks — for example, steps that must take place. Non-functional requirements describe, for example, how a final screen layout should appear.

This article appeared in the Oct n Nov n Dec 2010 issue of SAPinsider (http://sapinsider.wispubs.com) and appears here with permission from the publisher, WIS Publishing.

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Requirements

Deploy

Optimize

Operate

Design

Build and Test

ApplicationLifecycle

Management

Software design is a process of understanding the

problem that the final solution should solve and

ensuring that the software can in fact address the

problem when it is ready. After the purpose and

specifications of software are determined, soft-

ware developers usually design a plan for a

solution. The plan includes low-level component

and algorithm implementation issues, as well as

the architectural view.

Many different tools are used during the Design

phase, including modeling tools or modeling lan-

guages, such as business process modeling notation

(BPMN) and Unified Modeling Language (UML).�

� A modeling language is any artificial language that can be used to express information, knowledge, or systems in a structure defined by a consistent set of rules. The rules are used to interpret the meaning of components in the structure. A modeling language can be graphical or textual.

Finding the Right Tools to Support Requirements and Design: Easier Said Than Done The Requirements and Design phases are per-

haps the most important phases of the full

application life cycle. You’d be hard-pressed to

complete a successful application project without

doing this upfront work. I equate it to custom-

building a house; a contractor can’t just start

buying concrete and sheetrock without asking

the homeowners what they want the house to

look like. Nor can he just start hammering and

nailing things together without a detailed blue-

print and schedule to follow.

But executing the Requirements and Design

phases isn’t easy. You have to keep track of needs

and specifications from various stakeholders. Plus,

written requirements often get lost in translation

Figure 1 u An overview of the six

ITIL phases of ALM; this article

focuses on the Requirements and

Design phases

Phase Explanation

Requirements Gather and document requirements for software projects, such as a new application.

Design Build a blueprint to design an application, and select processes and scenarios to

implement.

Build and Test Code, configure, compile, and test the application.

Deploy Move the application into production after it functioned well in the test environment.

Trigger the export of all transports into the production system, and import them.

Operate Manage the application in production using monitoring tools to ensure that it

performs as expected.

Optimize Introduce additional features through an upgrade or enhancement package.

Fine-tune the application in production to ensure it runs efficiently.

Targeted solution

extensions offer

functionality to assist

during various ALM

phases. This article

focuses on how SAP

Enterprise Modeling by

IDS Scheer assists with

the Requirements and

Design stages.

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between business and IT. Companies would be

well-served to find a solution to help with this

process; one such solution is SAP Enterprise

Modeling by IDS Scheer.

SAP Enterprise Modeling offers a combination

of modeling, design, and process performance

management functionality that moves beyond

conceptual business process analysis toward the

planning and governance of corporate business

architecture.� This web-based, role-based, intuitive

solution, which both the business and IT sides

can use and collaborate around, assists with

enterprise modeling while also allowing you to

simulate how processes may be affected when new

applications are added or software is upgraded.

With this tool, you can structure, identify,

and describe the mission-critical IT components

within your infrastructure and align them to the

requirements of each business process. And, with

the integrated modeling environment, you can

design business processes based on consistent

standards throughout the enterprise and imple-

ment internal controls throughout your IT

architecture to comply with regulations and sup-

port your IT governance initiatives. The tool also

supports planning processes, from documenting

and analyzing the existing IT architecture to

establishing a whole new architecture (see side-

bar for additional benefits).

You can also reduce the complexity and dura-

tion of business intelligence consolidation projects

by modeling, integrating, and aligning views and

data flows from SAP NetWeaver Business Ware-

house (SAP NetWeaver BW). This makes it easier

to apply analytical information to your business

processes and provide valuable insight to your

employees as they execute day-to-day activities.

SAP Enterprise Modeling: 2 ALM Use CasesNow, let’s look at how organizations can use

SAP Enterprise Modeling in two ALM scenarios.

Scenario #1: Developing New SAP ApplicationsImagine that the product development team at

a retail company wants to create a new online

� The business architecture includes the planning and docu-mentation of processes with several levels of detail. It supports the governance of business processes and promotes their standardization across organizations.

bookstore to sell collateral. For the implementa-

tion of this new application, the business team

would need to determine — and communicate to

IT — the features they would like to include on

the website, such as the categories in which books

are listed, the type of shopping cart, and search

capabilities. This new application would need to

connect to the organization’s ERP back end to

incorporate financial information, as well as to a

database to store customer information.

When developing the requirements for this

implementation, business analysts would ideally

look at all possible scenarios and talk with other

stakeholders on the business side to consider

everyone’s requirements. They should look at the

big-picture goals of the project, including goals

from the end user’s perspective (in our example,

the end user is the customer browsing the online

store), and break the requirements down into

subtasks. It is advisable to do as much planning as

possible during this phase to avoid delaying or

derailing the development by drastically chang-

ing requirements later. Business analysts often

discuss, gather, and document requirements using

email, spreadsheets, and Microsoft Word documents.

And too often there is a disconnect between

business and IT after the requirements are handed

Key Benefits of SAP Enterprise Modeling by IDS ScheerWith SAP Enterprise Modeling, organizations can leverage their IT assets, improve performance, and reduce TCO; the tool significantly shortens timelines for upgrade and implementation projects, and simplifies customization based on business process requirements. It offers:

Process-oriented standardization of core business processes

One unique methodology for process roll-ins and roll-outs

An integrated, role-based, intuitive modeling environment

The ability to ensure process compliance and governance

Collaboration around shared views

The ability to maintain control over the organization’s IT architecture

Role-based publishing of business processes

The ability to optimize and standardize business processes to prepare for future upgrade or implementation projects

The ability to model business intelligence structures and data flows, and connect them to business processes

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off to the developers — that is, business and IT

may not understand what the other side wants.

To address this challenge, SAP Enterprise

Modeling enables business analysts to draw a dia-

gram illustrating their requirements and vision

for the end product. With this tool, they can cre-

ate a visual representation (a block diagram) of

their requirements — in essence, designing and

modeling the flow of an application as they

gather requirements, resulting in less confusion,

ambiguity, and misinterpretation (see Figure 2).

SAP Enterprise Modeling allows business folks

and IT to collaborate around the same visual dia-

gram (a flow chart, for example) during the Design

phase (see Figure 3). It also supports modeling

methods, such as event-driven process chains

(EPCs) and languages such as BPMN and UML,

which both business and IT can understand. Plus,

the models can be stored in a central repository,

enabling users to easily access the most up-to-date

version. IT can then work from this diagram when

developing the code for the new application.

As business analysts design and model a new

application with SAP Enterprise Modeling, they

can work across both SAP and non-SAP platforms

and systems and synchronize business processes

that span different environments (such as finance

and sales). In our scenario, for example, the busi-

ness analysts can look at the model of the new

online store from a customer relationship man-

agement (CRM) view and a financials view. The

tool also contains functionality for administering

databases, users, reports, and scripts. For example,

teams can connect to existing databases, and mul-

tiple users can interact and use the same platform.

In addition, users can generate reports on the sta-

tus of the project or of the model itself, and they

can keep records of relevant project communica-

tions between business and IT.

Scenario #2: Upgrading Existing SAP ImplementationsSAP Enterprise Modeling can also help you opti-

mize and standardize business processes as you

upgrade the software that drives your business.

Imagine that you are a supply chain manager,

and your company has upgraded its SAP ERP sys-

tem to the latest version. You would need to

consider the new functionality that the upgrade

is introducing and determine how it affects your

existing business processes. For example, you may

find that functionality in the upgrade automati-

cally verifies values in a certain field, whereas this

step was previously done manually. Thus, you can

eliminate this step from the business process.

Most importantly, you also want to ensure that

your relevant business processes are integrated

and standardized. To make sure that these business

processes are integrated into the upgraded imple-

mentation and that you don’t lose functionality

or compromise your business process perfor-

mance as a result of the upgrade, SAP Enterprise

Modeling offers functionality and interfaces for

process-driven SAP software management; the

tools also takes advantage of the standard SAP

process scenario, which can describe both existing

Figure 2 u SAP Enterprise

Modeling combines business

and IT information on the

same screen

SAP Enterprise

Modeling enables you

to structure, identify,

and describe the

mission-critical IT

components within

your infrastructure and

align them to the

requirements of each

business process.

Which data is input?

Which data is output?

Which system supports the task?

Who is responsible?

Which IS functions are supported by the system?

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“as-is” processes and future “to-be” processes.

With SAP Enterprise Modeling, you can get a

high-level view of the key processes, and then

drill down. This allows you to easily move from a

conceptual level to a logical or even a physical

level, all while maintaining appropriate relation-

ships and threads across these levels.

SAP Enterprise Modeling also allows you to

navigate to SAP transactions, access documenta-

tion of business scenarios and processes, and run

queries to see how a particular process would be

affected by an upgrade (see Figure 4). The tool

enables you to model business process execution

language (BPEL) processes in an early stage so

that you can then import them into SAP

NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP NetWeaver

PI) for enhancing, configuring, and executing.

Finally, SAP Enterprise Modeling allows you to

visualize data structures and data flows in your

new SAP implementation (see Figure 5).

Learn MoreClearly you can’t ignore the Requirements and

Design phases of ALM; these are integral steps to

any development project. But you don’t have to

dive into these phases without support — SAP

Enterprise Modeling by IDS Scheer can help you

more efficiently develop new SAP applications

and upgrade your existing SAP implementations.

To learn more, visit www.sap.com/solutions/

solutionextensions/enterprisemodeling. There

you can download a demo that walks through a

real-world example of how this solution extension

comes into play during an SAP software upgrade.

In an upcoming article, we will explore the

Build and Test phase and look at the relevant

solution extensions for that ALM stage. n

Figure 3 p A flow chart of a business process

Figure 4 p A business blueprint showing process changes

Figure 5 t You

can visualize data

structures and data

flows in a new SAP

implementation

SAP component

Transaction

SAP process step