App Lifecycle Management: a roadmap for homeowners

[dturchin]

I've had the pleasure of meeting most of our user groups. I always start with the same question: how long have you been in production? In most cases, two-thirds of customers have been in production less than a year or aren't yet in production. This week I was pleasantly surprised to learn that more than half of the customers at our UK user group have been in production more than two years (perhaps as long as 409 years for British history buffs).

To the extent I offer anything of value at user groups I always leave convinced I learned more than I shared. This was no exception. It turns out mature customers have different priorities. Ordinarily, much of the discussion focuses on what's new, what's shiny, and what delights users. Since Dublin went to controlled availability, that has mostly translated into Dublin innovation: smartphone, Password Reset, Resource Management, Vendor Performance, and Notify among others. Most of the UK SNUG discussion after the roadmap session (thanks keeshenniphof for the photos) wasn't about any of those. Most questions were about scaling the internal ServiceNow release process.

I put the questions in perspective on the long ride back from Warwick to London. The focus on release management made perfect sense for a group that had largely digested most core processes. The next set of challenges were managing demand for new features and managing stakeholder communication. Whereas most groups ask "what can you build with a hammer" we spent most of the event discussing the responsibilities of home ownership.

All of which provided great validation for directions we're headed in app lifecycle management. It was refreshing to hear so many customers interested in lower-profile aspects of the platform like SDLC and Team Development. SimonMorris' excellent discussion of agile development techniques was well-received in part because he's charismatic and witty but also because there's great interest in improving release predictability.

We're listening - and working on automating the release lifecycle. As demands arrive from the business...

• You'll be able to prioritize them with new visualizations,
• generate tasks from requirements that live within user stories, and
• assign them to releases based on level of effort assessed using story points.
• You'll then be able to assess status with burn down charts and track demonstrable progress in fixed intervals by assigning stories to sprints and epics.

As features are developed...

• You'll be able to perform continuous integration to ensure dev and ops are always aligned.
• You'll be able to create and store tests on the platform then
• run automated scripts from test suites and capture results.
• Defects identified when tests fail will be captured in the platform and once apps are pushed to production
• you'll be able to monitor them and generate events when issues occur.
• When they do, you'll be able to apply Change Management workflows and Configuration Automation to remediate, isolate root cause using collaboration tools like Live Feed, and
• capture root cause analyses as knowledge articles.

We're working hard to make it easier to be a ServiceNow system owner and we're specifically focusing on the needs of seasoned customers. The more we hear from you, the easier it is for us to make sure our priorities are yours.

Mostly, consider this a great big thank you to UK customers. Thanks for the feedback…the validation…the inspiration…and the nice pint that followed.

Interested in our roadmap for Application Lifecycle Management? Join us and 6,000 friends you haven't met at Knowledge14. See you there!