Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the second in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready.

1. Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle Helps Delta
Airlines Better Deliver Critical Business Applications
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the second in a series discussing a new book
on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: HP.
For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage
from application modernization, please click here.
Dana Gardner: Hi. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion that examines a new book on application
lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers some new
methods for overall business services delivery improvement. Complexity,
silos of technology and culture, as well as the shifting landscape of
applications’ delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness
of traditional applications’ approaches in large organizations.
But, in the book ‘The Applications Handbook: a Guide to Mastering the
Modern Application Lifecycle,’ the authors advance the importance and
impact of automation and management for application, as well as delve into
the need to gain control over application through a holistic lifecycle perspective.
This is the second in the series of three podcasts on the ‘Application Lifecycle Management’
book. We're here with the authors of the book, but we are also here to learn about how one
enterprise, Delta Air Lines, have moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality and
impact and to better deliver real business results from those applications.
We will hear Delta story from two IT executives in there and gain the reactions to the new
application’s life cycle book’s findings. So please join me now welcoming our panel. We are
joined by David Moses, Quality Assurance Manager for Delta’s eCommerce IT Group.
Welcome, David.
David Moses: Thanks very much. I'm glad to be here.
Gardner: We are also here with, Senior Test Engineer in the eCommerce IT Group at Delta as
well. Thank you, John.
John Bell: Thanks for having us.

2. Gardner: And we're joined by book’s authors, Mark Sarbiewski. He is Vice President of
marketing for HP Applications. Welcome, Mark.
Mark Sarbiewski: Thank you.
Gardner: And lastly, Brad Hipps. He is the Senior Manager for Solution Marketing at HP
Applications. Welcome back, Brad.
Brad Hipps: Thanks, Dana.
Gardner: Before we get into Delta’s experience, for our listeners, I'd like to explain a bit more
about the book. Mark, what were the driving needs or necessities that prompted you to write this
book and then perhaps get into some of the high-level takeaways and bindings?
Combination of factors
Sarbiewski: It really is a combination of factors, but the headline for me is that, more than ever,
business moves as software moves, your website moves, as your ERP system is
advanced, your supply chain, and your financials. Businesses are driven so
much by software now that it's really the long pole in the tent. Standing up
infrastructure is a necessity. Potentially, it can be done really fast. How quickly
can I innovate on my capabilities for my customers or my internal users?
So, business moves as software moves. When we look at how we've done over
the last 10 or 15 years, I could sum it by saying that legacy applications and
approaches are just too slow. Not only are they too slow, they are too costly.
They're riddled with security holes, which is increasing the challenges out there.
So, we have this dynamic that the business needs to move faster. Software is a prime driver in
innovating for the business, and where we've been is simply too slow. We need to rethink our
approach across the board, because there is no one silver bullet. It really boils down to I have to
leverage the latest technologies for things like reuse, where I get huge leverage for richer
customer experiences that need those wonderful new web application technologies that we have.
I have new processes that I can leverage in forms of agile and iterative types of things. To keep
the cost in line. I really want to be able to leverage global teams for flexible low cost, but expert
resources around the globe. I want them acting as if they were all local, like a dynamic Tiger
Team that was all local.
That’s a lot of change to make happen to serve the ultimate business needs. We took the
opportunity to take a step back and ask how all these things come together and how you can
blend this modern approach to really deliver what you need to deliver for the business.

3. Gardner: Brad Hipps, do you have anything to offer in terms of what people will take away
from the book?
Hipps: A lot of it is the chance to take a step back and have a bit of brain space to consider and
contemplate a lot of things Mark just touched on -- what are these ramifications
for my organization?
Nine times out of ten, most of us who are in IT developing applications, trying
to get on top of what it is the business wants, don't generally have the luxury of
taking a step back and asking has the ground shifted underneath my feet with
regard to all the things I am now expected to do and the ways I am expected to
do them, whether that’s process shifts, organizational shifts, or technology
shifts.
Generally the case is that the ground has shifted. Am I equipped, organized, and oriented to
respond effectively to all these changes? That’s one of the driving factors of the book and one of
the hopes that gives people a chance to step back, contemplate what these changes have been,
and also give a bit of guidance about how we might better get on top of these changes and really
wring the benefit out of them that we had expected when we first began to make them.
Gardner: Let's go to David Moses at Delta Air Lines. This isn’t just academic now. This is
something probably near and dear to you in your day-in and day-out activities. Maybe you could
sum up for us quickly what it is that you are doing there at Delta and why your customer-facing
applications are so important to your business.
Innovating for customers
Moses: The biggest thing that we have at Delta is to make sure that we innovate for our
customers and give them the latest greatest ability to take control of their
situation. If somebody wants to book a flight, they should be able to do it on any
media they like.
We want them to be able to make it in as few clicks as possible and as little
typing as possible. We really want to make it as convenient for the customer and
through the entire experience from the inspiration, all the way to when they are
back home. We want to deliver quality products to them.
That comes down to innovation and speed, because you can innovate for ever and never actually
release the product. For us, getting it out the door is very, very important. Some of the things that
we've heard already from Mark and Brad touch on the need to back away, get out the weeds, and
look at your overall lifecycle to make sure that you can get that speed. A lot of times, if you're
doing the status quo over and over again, you never realize how fast you can be. So, you raise
your head up, look around, and try to make some big changes.

4. Gardner: John Bell, what do you see as some of the hurdles that you need to continue to get
over, in order to get into that innovation and speed? What are some of the complications that are
typical, when you're trying to move these applications fast, but you also need to make them of a
high quality?
Bell: One of the things that’s really important to us is that we work with multiple vendors in
multiple locations and with multiple time zones. It's important to make sure that
all of them are using the same processes and that we're all using the overall
tools. We use quality center personally to help organize a lot of the
requirements and things like that in our testing efforts.
It's important that all of our vendors, whether it's in-house or people outside, are
giving us the same processes and that we are able to leverage any of our
automation or any of our business process testing or any of those tools, and that
we can actually deliver high quality software quickly, can reduce our
turnaround time, make sure that we're giving customers their best experience, and that we are
getting our time to market in a timely manner.
Gardner: David Moses, we heard a lot of in the book about automation and management and
then integrating those as much as possible. Maybe you could give me some perspective on that
higher level ability to excel at applications, multiple applications with rapid iteration, but not lose
control, and not let the complexity lead to chaos.
Moses: Complexity is always the enemy of speed and innovation, isn’t it? The idea is to make it
as simple as possible by having one version of the truth. You really have to get to that point, a
central repository of data, a central tool that everyone can use. As John said, we use Quality
Center. We keep everything in that, requirements, tough cases, automation. We pull scripts and
things from there for our test plans. We have one area with all that data, so all of our areas can
come to that and pull that information.
Whenever somebody needs to start up a script or anything like that, they’ve got a library that
they can pull from. They can bring it into their project. When they are done with their manual
testing and they place their test plan back in the library, John can then take those pieces and
immediately automate them.
Somebody once said they required a form to find out who they were going to, or what pieces
they were going to automate. For us, if you have one version of the truth, you know when things
are checked back in. You know when your test plan has been updated and your automation
people can make that decision. So, it's about getting rid of all the clutter, reducing the
complexity, having simple processes, getting rid of all the ones that don't matter, and just really
streamlining.
Gardner: Also, David, when you have a lifecycle mentality, you can fall back to that single
system of record for the application process. You can extend that not beyond just the
development test and deploy phases. It’s something that probably benefits the operation side,
maintaining, iterating, and improving on that app over time.

5. State of the application
Moses: Definitely. It's a great tool, because everyone has access to it. Everyone from our
business side people to our IT side, our operations people, can look in this and see exactly what
state the application is in at any time. They've got that snapshot. They can go in and determine
what new requirements they need to make and what enhancements they want. It's really helpful.
Gardner: John or David, I don't know which of you would be more comfortable, but can you
tell us a bit of about the recent development activity, maybe moving towards multiple devices or
entry points for customers. I know that's important to me when I fly. Tell us about the way that
you have been executing on this innovation, maybe relating that back to some of the principles in
the ALM book.
Moses: Recently, we've brought in some of the mobile devices like the iPhone and some of those
types of applications. In the past, a large number of our customers have always been using
the .com form. Now, we're finding more and more users are going towards the mobile devices.
We wanted to make sure that a lot of the applications lifecycle testing we had done with the .com
could also be used with the mobile. We were able to take automation and a lot of the test cases
and type things we had used with .com and use it with mobile.
We did write automation associated with mobile and were also able to bring that back into
Quality Center, running that via Quick Test Pro. Even though mobile was a newer area for us, we
were able to get the speed to market up on that as soon as possible.
Also, we were able to leverage that and use some of those automated scripts. We run those on a
daily basis against our production mobile environment. If something is wrong with that, we
know early in the morning. We run these scripts early in the morning before we come in, and we
can know right away if something is there.
So, we were able to take the lifecycle information and the wins that we have got from the .com,
and bring that into our mobile apps, and it's really helped us a lot. Our speed to market has
significantly improved with that.
Bell: Another case would be our new homepage. We're sitting here at the end of October 2010.
About a month ago, we released a new, more streamlined homepage, a lot more innovative. A lot
of people looked at that. We hid the logo during usability testing, and people were surprised to
find out it was an airline website. They thought of us as one of the cool guys out there in the
travel world.
We're getting much better in this area. By using all the feedback that we get from the customers,
importing information in the Quality Center, tracking everything that we have in there, we were
able to look at what we needed to make changes to. Once we released this, it was something that
the customers were wanting, so it got a lot of good response.

6. Gardner: Mark Sarbiewski at HP, tell me as you are listening to these gentlemen discuss their
efforts, how would some of the principles from the book help. It sounds to me as if it was very
complex going mobile or recasting your website. It could slow things down. It sounds like
because they took the proper steps, and it actually fell right into the place.
For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage
from application modernization, please click here.
Getting visibility
Sarbiewski: One of the keys that I heard them talking about here is giving everyone visibility
into not just the state of where things are, but the next things that have to
happen. One of the important things that to tease out of those kinds of
statements is the integration of the management information. What are the
requirements, which have been covered? What remain? What tests have been
run? What defects are found against what code?
There are a million things that happen to progress that project along. When a
test fails, a bunch of stuff has to happen. You've got to go find that and fix that. In all those
granular activities, there's a huge opportunity for lag, miscommunication, finger-pointing,
claiming it's not a defect, and all that.
When you have a system that pulls everybody together like that and gives a real-time view, it
really helps to advance the work forward as well. I also heard them talking about how tying
automation into that management system allowed them to do a cool website, that Web 2.0 feel,
very slick with a rich user experience, which is a must today, as well as mobile, which is a must,
without slowing things down.
To me the translation: Enormous competitive advantage in the marketplace. This has probably
never been more true. The technology teams are giving business an enormous competitive
advantage, like the kinds of stuff that they are doing.
Gardner: How about that David Moses? Toot your horn a little bit. The applications that you
and John are helping to develop and deploy, how impactful is this for Delta? How many of your
airline tickets are now being purchased and the customer service elements being delivered
through these apps? Is this sideline or is this much more main stream?
Moses: It's truly huge. I mean if you look at Delta.com, it's the main revenue driver for the entire
company. So it's our face to the world, and streamlining that process where people are making it
better and making the customer experience better is our number one goal. We want to really give
our customers what they want and make it easy for them, because we have a wide range of
customers.

7. We have pleasure customers who travel with their families once or may be twice a year,
sometimes even less, and then we have people who travel with us every week. So we have two
very different types of audiences and we have to cater to both. We have to make it fast and
enjoyable and we have to allow them to dream a little bit and be inspired by where they want to
go.
It's one of the biggest things that we have on our plate with mobile. Mobile is the future.
Everyone is going towards mobile devices and portable devices. You're seeing more and more
iPhones, iPads, and Android devices out there in the world, especially when you walk through
the airport. We don't like that it happens, but sometimes things are out of our control like
weather. And, we are always safe, so these things impact our schedule
Our devices now will allow you to jump right online and rebook, and take care of yourself. We're
actually going to do it for you first, and we are going to give you the option of keeping our
suggestion, but if you want something different, you have got that choice. Its options and speed
that really count, when the customers want to do something that impacts their lives. When they
are trying to use the product, they can impact whether they get home to see their kids tonight or
not. You need to give them options and you need to give them something really quick.
Gardner: Brad Hipps, as I listen, I also recall that one of the principles of the book you and
Mark wrote was about being change ready, and I think you were talking about being change
ready in terms of how you develop applications. With Delta, that change readiness comes at
multiple levels. Not only do they have to innovate rapidly in their development, but their
application themselves have to be change ready. That is to say, they need to be able to react to
changing weather and very high scaling multiple variables involved with keeping all the people
up-to-date.
Maybe you can help me get your impressions about how important change ready is and Delta is
probably a poster child for that.
Core lifecycle
Hipps: I think that's right. In the book, when we talk about the core lifecycle, historically the
SDLC -- we just call it the core lifecycle, so as not to get lost in alphabet soup. Within that we
see traits among world-class organizations. There tend to be four traits that these world class
organizations have mastered, and we list these traits as being change ready. They have a high
degree of predictability, high degree of repeatability, and certainly their output is of high quality.
So those four: change readiness, predictability, repeatability and quality, tend to be abstracting
some traits that we see across these great orgs. Those tend to be the key ones that really they are
very effective at. David and John have talked about that we have got data points in each one of
those, in some of the examples they have given.

8. A lot of this change readiness to a large degrees is formed by the point that we made in the
beginning in the podcast, which is that fundamentally everything that business wants to do is
going to have some applications or set of applications behind it. There is going to be a
dependency there.
As Mark said, the business is only as nimble as its applications are. That puts applications teams
in a position where they are not holding the business off at arms length, and saying, "No, no, no,
no, no, I can't do that. No, that will take months." That rigidity may be historically where we
came from, when we had fewer applications. They changed less. They were much bigger, more
monolithic, and brittle. That is not the world we live in today.
Today, change is the expectation. David and John have been talking about this code being lead
revenue generator and delta.com being the lead source of revenue on the Delta side. It's a great
example. Clearly, anything the business wants to do to advance its market presence is going to
come through that application.
The fact that they have leveraged automation and asset reuse and taken the time to build
requirements traceability are all tick marks you put against organizations that have configured
themselves to be change ready. That means they have stripped out as much latency as possible,
the time it takes to do impact analysis.
They can see pretty quickly what all the dependencies are as a new change comes across. That’s
just speaking of the assessment. There is, of course, the execution, which depends on
automation, asset reuse, and all the things they talked about. We probably covered four of those,
but certainly the change readiness does stand out.
Gardner: David Moses, the idea that more businesses are going to have to do what you have
seems pretty clear. You're already well into updated web, very fast change transactional integrity,
bringing in mobile devices, and it sounds as if you are well advised in terms of the ALM
principles that the book discusses. For those organizations that are not quite there, that are still
getting up to speed that are transitioning from legacy approaches and methods around
development, what advice might you give them in terms of trying to get to where you already
are?
Moses: This is my favorite topic too. First of all, you’ve got to have that one version of the truth.
I would highly recommend getting that, the central tool that everyone can use and that you can
put everything in.
Second, it’s about mindset and alignment to your goals. You have to have alignment to the
customer. You still have to have department goals, but they should be aligned to what the
customer needs.

9. Contradiction in goals
A lot of times, you see a contradiction in goals between the business group and an IT group.
Delivering what the IT group wants to do may not exactly get what the business wants. And if
the business was focused on the customer and the IT groups are focused on how many projects
they can get out, but doesn’t really matter what projects they are, then there's an issue.
So, you have to really align very closely between business and IT, so much so that if you even
have something that is a huge impact to your company, you may want to wrap a special forces
team or integrity team around that, and have that group be one. Business and IT all in one group
-- that way you completely eliminate the us-versus-them mentality. If you can’t do that, definitely
make sure that you're aligned to the customer.
Gardner: John Bell, any further words of wisdom that you might want to share with folks who
are making the transition from older legacy, development, deployment, and test practices to some
of these newer principles?
Bell: One thing to add to that is that, at first, it can be a little scary moving things in, like moving
all your requirements into one area and getting all the test cases and things and even looking at
automation.
Sometimes, you have to take a half step back in order to take a full step forward. With us, even
as we were moving things and centralizing it, there could be a little pain point in doing that, but
that pain point will more than payoff in the long run. A lot of the people who are holding on to
the old methodologies and ways of doing business, are thinking, "We're going to have to take a
step back to do this."
Whatever step you take in that direction and whatever pain point you take as you move forward,
once you start getting the automations in place, once you get these tools in place, you’ll see that
you can start moving faster and faster that any initial pain point you took. You're going to
exponentially get that money back, plus your time, so quickly that you will be shocked.
Just look at the changing world that we live in. With delta.com now, we live here in Atlanta. If
you go over to the airport, you realize that our business is not just flying customers within the
United States in English. We now have kiosks in six different languages, and you meet people
from all over the world that are now using our products and our websites in everything from
simple Chinese to French.
It’s important that we realize the global nature of what we are doing, and that our methodology
and our IT departments have to align ourselves, so that we can move this quickly. Without the
automation and without the centralized tools and things we would never be able to put out as
much work as we currently do.
Moses: If I can jump back in, there is one thing that John said that reminded me of something, as
far as taking those steps. You need to take a step back to take two steps forward, when you are

10. coming down to requirements -- another one of my favorite topics. I spent so much time trying to
convince other managers in the organization, especially the BA manager to really input
requirements in the Quality Center. I really wish I had Quality Center 11 at that time, because
now it’s like a Word document to enter your requirements, which is what everybody wanted,
right?
Back then, there was a lot of resistance to it, because there were forms and windows and things
to fills out. So, it would have such an easier discussion. I hear that often too, whenever I am at
HP Software Universe and people are talking about this. They say that there is such a resistance
to certain things and certain teams incorporating their work, but now it’s so much easier that it’s
almost a no-brainer.
As I said, I wish I had QC 11 back at the time I was fighting that battle, but thankfully we won,
everybody saw the benefit of it, and we have been going forward ever since.
Requirements are important
There's another benefit, whenever you're talking about companies moving forward and
innovating. I'd like to talk about requirements and not having your quality assurance people
sitting in requirements meetings. To me, your quality assurance group really wants to know what
the requirements will be, not what they may be. So, they're sitting in a meeting for a few weeks
or months at a time to get requirements down, talking about what may be, when they could be
testing.
You need to get things out to the customer. You can leverage your team like that. We do a ton of
work with the small amount of people that’s comparable to other people in the industry, and
that’s one of the main reasons we can do that.
Gardner: I guess we could sum that up as being focused on change ready not change waiting.
Moses: Exactly.
Bell: Absolutely.
Moses: Well, you have to have the right tools and you have to have enough knowledge in your
group to be able to pull that off, and you have to have great documentation too.
Gardner: Thank you, David Moses. We're going to wrap it up there. We've been discussing how
a shifting application’s landscape has provided a huge opening for improving how applications
are built, consumed and managed by using new ALM methods and concepts. And we've seen
how Delta Air Lines, in particular, has moved successfully to improve its applications quality,
and gain the ability to deliver better business results from their efforts.
I'd like to thank our guests today. We've been joined by David Moses, Quality Assurance
Manager for Delta. Thank you.

11. Moses: Thank you very much.
Gardner: And I should also add that he is in the eCommerce IT group there at Delta along with
John Bell, who is a Senior Systems Engineer. Thank you, John.
Bell: Thanks for having us.
Gardner: We also have been joined by the authors of the book. That would be Mark Sarbiewski.
He is Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications. Thanks, Mark.
Sarbiewski: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And lastly, Brad Hipps, Senior Manager for Solutions Marketing, HP Applications.
Thanks, Brad.
Hipps: Thanks again.
Gardner: This is a second in a series of free podcast on ALM. We're examining a new book on
the subject, ‘The Applications Handbook: a Guide to Mastering the Modern Application
Lifecycle.'
Our first podcast explored the actual need for the book and why organizations should rethink
how they develop and deploy applications, and our final podcast will underscore the conclusions
from the book, and explain how other organizations can now begin to change how they deliver
and maintain applications that better serves a fast changing world.
We hope that you can join us for the rest of our series, and we also hope that you get a chance to
get the book and examine it in more detail.
This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a
sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.
For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage
from application modernization, please click here.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: HP.
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the second in a series discussing a new book
on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor
Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

12. You may also be interested in:
• Doing Nothing Can be Costliest IT Course When Legacy Systems and Applications Are
Involved
• HP's Robin Purohit Unpacks Business Service Management 9 as Way to Address
Complexity in Hybrid Data Centers
• HP Shows Benefits from Successful Application Consolidation With Own Massive
Global Supply Chain Project