Serena Software has been around a long time: it cut its teeth in mainframe software development with products like ChangeMan, sold into large, traditional enterprise customers with large, traditional development methodologies. While the company does have a culture of innovation, its customers tend to be wary of change – their idea of change management is to not change anything.
I have met Serena in the City before, but yesterday it came to Shoreditch to talk about some of its new development directions. Julian Fish ran through demos of their latest tools, including a new dashboard, an OEM version of WebFOCUS IBI, which will allow Serena to tie into a wider range of metadata, including external data feeds. Serena is also pushing its new Service Porfolio Manager as a platform. Integration of the two allows users to start asking questions such as “when are production environments idle?” or “when are users actually available for testing?”.
Integration is one of the key themes of the latest Serena tooling. Fish explained that Serena was also now working with TaskTop Technologies, a RedMonk client, because it supports integration and sync with other ALM platforms. IBM is also biting the bullet, and getting serious about DevOps (which doesn’t just mean tight integration between Tivoli and Rational).
The days of one ALM repository to rule them all are seemingly behind us for now. Customers want integration across development toolsets rather than rip and replace. Enterprise IT shops prefer incremental change, in both tools and methods, which is one reason you end up with awful terms such as ScrumFall (ie Waterfall with a bit of Scrum)
(Cross-posted @ James Governor’s Monkchips)
