A recent study by the IEEE revealed that managers tend to make development decisions based largely on instinct. But in today’s highly complex IT environments, you must prioritize based on harder data. Further, with large global development teams, you need to ensure that you are constantly monitoring for adherence to service level agreements. You can govern these portfolios when you have access to sufficient insight into your applications. Let’s take a look at typical information sources for making intelligent portfolio management decisions.

• First, you need to ensure that decisions about the application portfolio are understood in a business light. This means surveying stakeholders to determine which activities will yield the most value to your organization. Micro Focus technologies allow you to create browser-based questionnaires to solicit views from opinion-makers throughout the organization. How valuable is a business process? Are there frequent outages of a particular application? Which business process matters most? These details help you to better sequence your massive development queue.

• Second, you may need information from other technologies to help buttress your decision-making. For instance, it may be important to determine where bugs are arising in your applications. This may lead you to match code quality issues and resulting renovation projects better. Or, you may look at costs to maintain an application and match these costs with the complexity of a given application. This can help to determine which teams may need to be reinforced.

• Third, you may need to have insights into measurements about the quality of your application code. Measures like cyclomatic complexity and size are important metrics that help determine where and how much effort should be focused by development teams.

The degree to which you emphasize the collection of different metrics will vary depending on how your business measures itself. Ideally, you will want to combine measurements to answer different management questions that support your governance of the development organization.

Importantly, these metrics should be combined based on business concepts that matter to you.
Your control over your application portfolio is stronger when measurements are filtered by groupings like business process, geography, or development team. If you can show that complexity is rising in a mission-critical business process or software quality is declining in code managed by an outsourcer, you can make better fact-based decisions about your application portfolio.

At Micro Focus Live, we'll look in detail at the idea of governing your application portfolio and how Micro Focus technologies can streamline the process.