Systems Perspective on Software Development Project Cycle

The “Cloud” has become the dominant global trend in Enterprise IT today and the big question for many businesses is how to transform their IT model or adapt cloud initiatives to align with their strategy, structure and processes. I would like to take a step back and take a systems approach to analyze the challenges in the current software development life-cycle. I think a systems model will help in learning about the dynamic complexity of IT development projects and understand the sources of resistance to design more effective system models/policies for cloud transformation strategies.

I created a causal loop diagram to understand the challenges and relationships between different variables of the IT project cycle. The intent is to include sufficient number of key variables and their relationships to represent reality.

The Causal Loop Diagram shows four important loops:
   1. Product Development (Balancing loop)
   2. Product Management (Reinforcing loop)
   3. Employee Productivity (Balancing loop)
   4. Product Maintenance (Reinforcing loop)

The balancing Product Development loop illustrates that when there is an increase in customer requirements, need for scoping the existing software functionality and architectural design decisions increase as well. The reinforcing Product Management loop suggests that perturbations such as management actions can lead quickly to major changes in project schedule, prioritization and performance.

There is one key negative feedback loop - Employee Productivity. This loop reflects the assumption that if a task falls behind schedule or there is a critical customer requirement, management will direct workers to work overtime to put the task back on schedule in order to satisfy customer deadlines. The Product Maintenance loop represents the post development maintenance activities that involve deploying the software to meet customer business requirements.


Among other things, I think one of the significant advantages for software development teams will be to leverage the cloud vendor for the infrastructural related maintenance activities. Another causal loop diagram depicting the cloud IaaS/PaaS/SaaS model will reveal the finer details. Will get to it next ...