Mendix Provides Bridge Between IT and Business with Agile App Development
by Bill Ives
There has been a lot of discussion about how the cloud can make CIOs and their organizations more strategic (see for example, Can Cloud Computing Make IT More Strategic?). Mendix is focused on supporting this strategic capability by facilitating the agile development of business apps. Mendix is an agile application lifecycle management company. They provide a platform that enables business and IT to work together more easily to create and host business applications. I recently spoke with Paul Campaniello to find out more about what they are doing
Paul shared one comparison between traditional development and Mendix enabled development that best summarizes what this capability can bring. A team used a traditional Java based approach to build an application and it took 670 person days and less than 20 % of the time was spent on analysis and modeling, the part where business plays the largest role. The team using Mendix spent 171 person days and over 50% of the time was spent on analysis and modeling. This is because once the application is designed, the rest is automated by Mendix and the iterative improvements also happen quickly further reducing total development time.
Mendix has provided a platform to facilitate the development process and achieve this type of result. There are three components. sprintr™ is a collaborative project management service that supports agile project teams in managing the complete Application Lifecycle. The Mendix AppFactory™has two components within it. The Business Modeler is an application development suite that allow for visual modeling of application requirements and workflow. The AppStore is a community-driven & open source market place for best-practice apps & templates. Finally, the Enterprise Cloud Dashboard™ deploys applications into the cloud with a single click and uses the dashboard to monitor all apps and centrally manage IT governance, performance and usage.
These three components work together in a closed loop development cycle. First, user stories and requirements are captured in sprintr. Below you can see a sample sptintr screen looking at story collection.
Here is a spintr screen that shows the activity stream.
Then the designed apps are quickly turned into apps in the App Factory. Below you can see a design in progress.
Next, the apps are put into the cloud with a single click in the Enterprise Cloud Portal. Now users can provide feedback through a set of feedback tools and the cycle can be quickly repeated in an iterative process until the apps meet requirements and the users as happy. This entire process is managed through the Enterprise Cloud Dashboard. They have also moved parts of this process to mobile devices. Below you can see a sample dashboard screen.
I like what they are doing. I have seen app development take months and years using the old methods. Agile development has been around for a while and has already proven its value. Here is a nice platform to accelerate this value and allow IT to work closer with the business units so both can be more strategic.
