Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain.

1. HP's ALM11 Guides Companies Through Shifting Landscape
of Application Development
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on application lifecycle management and HP
ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor:
HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you
from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
We're here the week of November 29, 2010 to explore some major enterprise
software and solutions, trends and innovations, making news across HP’s
ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I’ll be your host
throughout this series of HP-sponsored Software Universe Live Discussions. To learn more about
HP’s application life-cycle management (ALM) news and its customer impact from the
conference here, please join me now in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Product
Marketing for HP applications. Welcome Mark.
Mark Sarbiewski: Thank you, Dana. Good to be with you.
Gardner: Good to be with you. We've seen, over the past several years, sort of a shifting
landscape of how applications are delivered and deployed. It seems as if the traditional way of
doing this just isn’t working, and there seems to be complexity, slowness, and quality issues.
First, why is that, and then second, what is HP doing about it?
Sarbiewski: It’s a question that we talk to our customers about all the time. It boils down to the
same old changes that we see sort of every 10 years. A new technology comes
into play with all its great opportunity and problems, and we revisit how we do
this. In the last several years, it’s been about how do I get a global team going,
focused on potentially a brand-new process and approach.
You’ve got changes in how you are organized. You’ve got changes in the
approach that people are taking. And, you’ve got brand-new technology in the
mix and new ways of actually constructing applications. All of these hold great
promise, but great challenges too. That's clashing with the legacy approach that
people in the past took in building software.
Gardner: What is HP going to about this? We’ve got kind of an inflection point, a generational
shift. Now, what’s the response?

2. Sarbiewski: The short answer is that that legacy approach is not going to be the right path for
delivering modern applications. As far as the core problems that I just mentioned, we’ve been
hard at work for a couple of years now, recasting and re-inventing our portfolio to match that
modern approach to software, going through them one-by-one.
What are the new technologies that everybody is employing? We’ve got rich Internet
technologies, Web 2.0, approaches and our technology is there. For composite applications,
we’ve built a variety of capabilities that help people understand how to make the performance
right with those technologies, keep the security and the quality high, while keeping the speed up.
Moving to Agile
So it’s everything from how do we do performance testing in that environment to testing things
that don’t have interfaces, and how do we understand the impact of change on
the systems like that. We’ve built capabilities that help people move to Agile
as a process approach, things like fundamentally changing how they can do
exploratory testing, and how they can bring in automation much sooner in the
process of performance, quality, and security.
Lastly, we’ve been very focused on creating a single, unified system that
scales to tens of thousands of users. And, it’s a web-based system, so that wherever the team
members are located, even if they don’t work for you, they can become a harmonious part of the
overall team, 24-hour cycles around the globe. It speeds everything up, but it also keeps
everyone on the same page. It’s that kind of anytime, anywhere access that’s just required in this
modern approach to software.
Gardner: As I'm hearing the news here at the show being rolled out, it occurs to me that we're
bringing together aspects of this whole lifecycle that for decades been very distinct and different,
usually from different vendors, and with wholly different platforms beneath them. So, why is it
important that ALM11 pretty much has an integrated system with all the stakeholders, all the
team member focused in the same direction or at least integrated at some level?
Sarbiewski: When I talk to customers, I ask them, how they're supporting software. If we talk
about software delivery, it's fundamentally a team sport. There isn't a single stakeholder that does
it all. They all have to play and do their part.
When they tell me they’ve got requirements management in Word, Excel, or maybe even a
requirements tool, and they have a bug database for this, test management for that, and this tool
here, on the surface it looks like they fitted everybody with a tool and it must be good. Right?
The problem is that the work is not isolated. You might be helping each individual stakeholder
out a little bit, but you're not helping the team. The team’s work relates to each other. When
requirements get created or changed, it's the ripple effect. What tests have to be modified or
newly created? What code then has to be modified? When that code gets checked in, what tests

3. has to be run? It’s the ripple effect of the work we talk about it as workflow automation. It's also
the insight to know exactly where you are.
When the real question of how far am I on this project or what quality level am I at -- am I ready
to release -- needs to be answered in the context of everyone’s work, I have to understand how
many requirements are tested? Is my highest priority stuff working against what code?
So, you see the team aspects of it. There is so much latency in a traditional approach. Even if
each player has their own tool, it's how we get that latency out and the finger-pointing and the
miscommunication that also results. We take all that out of that process and, lo and behold, we
see our customers cutting their delivery times in half, dropping their defect rates by 80 percent or
more, and actually doing this more cheaply with fewer people.
Gardner: So clearly HP ALM 11 is not going to allow sacrifice in the overall process for some
individual choice and benefits, but let's get into the actual parts here. We’ve got parts that are
updated around requirements, development, and quality. Tell me a little bit about the constituent
parts of this overall umbrella?
Sarbiewski: In requirements management, one of the big new things that we’ve done is allow
the import of business process models (BPMs) into the system. Now, we’ve got the whole
business process flow that’s pulled right into the system. It can be pulled right from the systems
like Eris or anything that’s putting in the standard business process modeling language (BPML)
right into the system.
Actual business processes
Now, everyone who accesses ALM 11 can see the actual business process. We can start
articulating that this is the highest priority flow. This step of the business process, maybe it's
check credit or something like that, is an external thing but it's super-important. So, we’ve got to
make sure we really test the heck out of that thing.
Everyone is aligned around what we’re doing, and all the requirements can be articulated in that
same priority. The beautiful thing now about having all this in one place is that work connects to
everything else. It connects to the test I set up, the test I run, the defects I find, and I can link it
even back to the code, because we work with the major development tools like Visual Studio,
Eclipse, and CollabNet.
Gardner: So what are the parts we have? We’ve got this really interesting requirements manager
that’s integrated with BPM, and I want to get back to that in a moment. The second part is
Performance Center update, and then we’ve got new LoadRunners, right?
Sarbiewski: That’s exactly right. You mentioned Development Manager a minute ago. It's
hugely important that we connect into the world of developers. They're already comfortable with
their tools. We just want to integrate with that work, and that’s really what we’ve done. They
become part of the workflow process. They become part of the traceability we have.

4. You mentioned performance testing. We have the industry leading solution here and major
market share there. What we hear from our customers is that the coolest new technology they
want to work with is also the most problematic from a performance standpoint.
We went back to the drawing board and reinvented how well we can understand these great new
Web 2.0 technologies, in particular Ajax, which is really pervasive out there. We now can script
from within the browser itself. The big breakthrough there is if the browser can understand it, we
can understand it. Before, we were sort of on the outside looking in, trying to figure out what a
slider bar really did, and when a slider bar was moved what did that mean.
Now, we can generate a very readable script. I challenge anybody. Even a businessperson can
understand, when they're clicking through an application, what gets created for the performance
testing script.
We parameterize it. We can script logic there. We can suggest alternate steps. The bottom line is
that the coolest new Web 2.0 front ends can now be very easily performance tested. So we don't
end up in that situation where it's great, you did a beautiful rich job, and it's such a compelling
interface, but only works when 10 people are hitting the application. We've got to fix that
problem.
It speeds everything up, because it's so readable and quick. And it just works seamlessly. We've
tested against the top 40 websites, and they are out there out using all this great new technology
and it's working flawlessly.
Gardner: So, we've had some significant improvements and upgrades. We’ve got better
integration. We're looking at this at the process level and we brought in BPM. But, I also heard
from the main stage presentation here in Barcelona about a couple of new things. We've got
Unified Functional Testing 11 and HP Sprinter. Could you help me understand a bit more about
those?
Lots of pieces
Sarbiewski: Absolutely. If you think about a composite application, it's really made up of lots of
pieces. There are application services or components. The idea is that if I’ve got something that
works really well and I can reuse it as part of and combine it with maybe a few other things or in
a couple of new pieces and I get new capability, I've saved money. I’ve moved faster and I'm
delivering innovation to the business in a much better, quicker way and it should be rock-solid,
because I can trust these components.
The challenge is, I'm not making up software made of lots of bits and pieces. I need to test every
individual aspect of it. I need to test how they communicate together and I need to do end-to-end
testing.

5. If I try to create composite apps and reuse all this technology, but it takes me ten times longer to
test, I haven’t achieved my ultimate goal which was cheaper, faster and still high quality. So
Unified Functional Testing is addressing that very challenge.
We've got Service Test which actually is incredible visual canvas for how I can test things that
don't have an interface. One of the big challenges with something that doesn't have an interface is
that I can't test it manually, because there are no buttons to push. It's all kind of under the covers.
But, we have a wonderful, easy, brand-new reinvented tool here called Service Test that takes
care of all that.
That’s connected and integrated with our functional testing product that allows you to test
everything end-to-end in the GUI level. The beautiful thing about our approach is you get to do
that end-to-end, GUI level type of testing and the non-GUI stuff all from one solution and you
report out all the testing that you get done.
So again, bring in a lot of automation to speed it up, keep the quality high and the time down low
and you get to see it all kind of come together in one place.
Gardner: Right. I was going to say we’ve heard a lot about Instant-On here as well. I am
assuming that Sprinter might have something to offer there.
Sarbiewski: Absolutely. Sprinter is not even a reinvention. It's brand-new thinking about how
we can do manual testing in an Agile world. Think of that Instant-On world. It's such a big
change when people move to an Agile delivery approach. Everyone on the team now plays kind
of a derivative role of what they used to do. Developers take a part of testing, and quality folks
have to jump in super-early. It's just a huge change.
What Sprinter brings is a toolset for that tester, for that person who is jumping in, getting right
after the code to give immediate feedback, and it's a toolset that allows that tester to
automatically figure out what test apps are supposed to go through to drop in data instead of
typing it in. I don't have to type it anymore. I can just use an Excel spreadsheet and I can start
ripping through screens and tests really fast, because I'm not testing whether it can take the input.
I'm testing whether it processes it right.
A bunch of cool tools
And when I come across an error, there's a tool that allows me to capture those screens, annotate
them, and send that back to the developer. What’s our goal when we find a defect? The goal is to
explain exactly what was done to create the defect and exactly where it is. There are a whole
bunch of cool tools around that.
The last point I’d make about this is called Mirror Testing. It’s super-important. It’s imperative
that things like websites actually work across the variety of browsers and operating environments
and operating systems, but testing all those combinations is very painful.

6. Mirror Testing allows the system to work in the background, while someone is testing, say on
XP and Internet Explorer, five other systems, different combinations will be driven on the exact
same test. I'm sitting in front of it, doing my testing, and in the background, Safari is being tested
or Firefox.
If there is an error on that system, I see it, I mark it, and I send it right away, essentially turning
one tester into six. It's really great breakthrough thinking on the part of R&D here and a huge
productivity bump.
Gardner: Now, we have some major shifts impacting developers and basically the entire
lifecycle around apps. There’s more emphasis on mobile suddenly, and there’s a need to integrate
with the business process side of things. There's the need to do things faster. We're also seeing an
emphasis on mixed sourcing or hybrid computing. Then, just to make things more interesting,
there's an emphasis on bringing these things out in a way that helps the business faster, and in a
more declarative way. That is to say, it hits the bottom-line in a good way.
How was it that this overall set of capabilities you’ve described fit into these trends? It seems to
me that you are trying to strike the balance between inclusive, and integrated, but also agnostic
and open to all of these different aspects. Tell me how that works.
Sarbiewski: What we hear from our customers is that they really do want their lives to be
simplified, and the conclusion that they have come to in many cases is Post-It Notes, emails, and
Word docs. It seems simpler at first and then it quickly falls apart at scale. Conversely, if you
have tools that you can only work with in one particular environment, and most enterprises have
a lot of those, you end up with a complex mess.
Companies have said, "I have a set of development tools. I probably have some SAP, maybe
some Oracle. I’ve got built-in .NET, with Microsoft. I do some Eclipse stuff and I do Java. I’ve
got those but if you can work with those and if you can help me get a common approach to
requirements, to managing tests, functional performance, security, manage my overall project,
and integrate with those tools, you’ve made my life easier."
When we talk about being environment agnostic, that’s what we mean. Our goal is to support
better than anyone else in the market the variety of environments that enterprises have. The
developers are happy where they are. We want them as part of the process, but we don’t want to
yank them out of their environment to participate. So our goal again is to support those
environments and connect into that world without disrupting the developer.
And, the other piece that you mentioned is just as important. Most customers aren’t taking one
uniform approach to software. They know they’ve got different types of projects. I’ve got some
big infrastructure software projects that I am not going to do all the time and I am not going to
release every 30 days and a waterfall approach or a sequential approach is perfect for that.

7. Rock solid
I want to make sure it’s rock solid, that I can afford to take that type of an approach, and it's the
right approach. For a whole host of other projects, I want to be much more agile. I want to do 60-
day releases or 90-day releases or even more, and it makes sense for those projects. What I don’t
want, they tell us, I don’t want every team inventing their own approach for Waterfall, Agile, or
custom approaches. I want to be able to help the teams follow a best-practice approach.
As far as the workflow, they can customize it. They can have an Agile best practice, a Waterfall
best practice, and even another one if they want. The system helps the team do the right thing
and get a common language, common approach, all that stuff. That’s the process kind of agnostic
belief we have.
Gardner: Last, Mark, tell me how you get started. When are these going to be available, and are
there any changes in licensing or pricing in terms of trying to make it simpler for people acquire
these?
Sarbiewski: They're available now. The great news is that today you can download all the
solutions that we’ve talked about for trials. We have some online demos that you can check out
as well. There are a lot of white papers and other things. You can literally pull the software 30
minutes from now and see what I'm talking about.
On the licensing side, we believe that the simplest approach is a concurrent license, which we
have on most of the products that we’ve got here. For all the modules that we’ve been talking
about, if you have a concurrent license to the system, you can get any of the modules. And, it’s a
nice floating license. You don’t have to count up everybody in your shop and figure out exactly
who is going to be using what module.
The concurrent license model is very flexible, nice approach. It’s one we’ve had in the past.
We're carrying it forward and we’ll look to continue to simplify and make it easier for customers
to understand all the great capabilities and how to simply license so that they can get their teams
to their modules for the capability they need.
Gardner: Thanks to Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, for
giving us the deep-dive on HP's Application Lifecycle Management news and its customer
impact from the conference.
Sarbiewski: Thank you, Dana. I appreciate the time.
Gardner: And Thanks to you for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to
you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
Look for other podcasts from this HP event on the HP.com website, as well as via the
BriefingsDirect network.

8. I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software
Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor:
HP
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on application lifecycle management and HP
ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.
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