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Overcome the Frustrating Lack of .NET Deployment Tools

71% of application problems are still found by real users and not by existing tools or testing procedures
By Dan Garlewicz, Hon Wong
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September 24, 2006 12:30 PM EDT
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 14,505
ROI Proposition
The return on investment (ROI) in deploying such a suite of tools can be measured quantitatively in terms of the:
  • Cost savings of reducing developer involvement in applications already in production.
  • Cost savings from a faster development cycle.
  • Operational cost saving by doing more with existing IT operations and help desk headcount.
Let's look at these in more depth.

  • The cost savings of reducing developer involvement in the applications already in production:
    For example, let's say that an average developer costs $150,000 a year on a fully loaded basis, and you have a 10-person team for an annual headcount cost of $1.5 million. If these developers have to spend 40% of their time troubleshooting production problems (as noted in the Forrester study), you're spending $600,000 a year on production debugging. If you can cut this percentage from 40% to 20%, the savings will be $300,000 a year.

  • The cost savings from a faster development cycle
    Take for example the same team of 10 developers, which carry a monthly headcount cost of $1.5 million/12 months, or $125,000 a month. If you can shorten the development cycle of a new application by just one month, you'll save $125,000.

  • The operational cost saving of doing more with existing IT operations and help desk headcount
    The tools can contribute to operational savings by:
    - Proactively detecting real user performance problems thus preventing a call to the help desk. The reduction in customer service costs could be as much as $200 per incident, assuming that each incident generates four calls and that the cost of handling each call is $50; and
    - Minimizing the need to assemble cross-functional problem triage team (consisting of development, network, server, administrative, and DBA personnel) by using the suite of tools to automatically triage the problem. The cost of assembling such a triage team could save, for example, five to 10 man-hours per incident and that conservatively translates to $375 to $750 per incident in out-of-pocket expenses (if operations are outsourced at a $75-per-hour billing rate) or opportunity cost.

    Certainly, delays in time-to-market, bad application performance, broken links, and exceptions lead to lost opportunities and poor user satisfaction. As you know, poor user satisfaction begets lost business for customer-facing applications, and degrades employee productivity for intranet applications or employee portals. These "soft" costs are harder to calculate and perhaps far exceed the "hard" costs stated above. However, since these costs are typically unknown or not measurable at the front of the project, they are rarely budgeted for and greatly reduced the overall ROI of the project.

    The .NET Framework has been a tremendous boost to application development, but its very success has increased the demands on development and operations. Adopting tools with the right capabilities can meet these demands and unlock the full potential benefits of developing applications in .NET. To achieve the promise of this environment and adjust to the increased complexity of development, implementation, and ongoing operational support, development and operations teams need to fully understand that a paradigm shift is occurring. This shift provides greater capabilities, and the cost is that the business must come to terms with the requirement for increased focus on comprehensive documentation and testing, service management, and operational support.

    Implementing performance management throughout the software development lifecycle is a critical aspect for managing the quality of service of a .NET application. By implementing a consistent tool, IT can optimize both the development cycle and ongoing operational controls needed to enhance and maintain the service levels the business demands.

    • Published September 24, 2006 – Reads 14,505
    Copyright © 2006 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
    Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

    More Stories By Dan Garlewicz

    Dan Garlewicz is chief executive officer at Core Systems Group a consultancy focused on business alignment, risk management, and operations excellence. He has spent over 20 years in IT executive positions with global consumer and pharmaceutical corporations including Nabisco, Philip Morris and Aventis. He was most recently a featured speaker at the 2005 Microsoft Management Summit on .NET performance management issues.

    More Stories By Hon Wong

    Hon has served as CEO of Symphoniq Corporation since its inception. Prior to joining Symphoniq, Hon co-founded NetIQ, where he served on the board of directors until 2003. Hon has also co-founded and served on the board of several other companies, including Centrify, Ecosystems (acquired by Compuware), Digital Market (acquired by Oracle) and a number of other technology companies. Hon is also a General Partner of Wongfratris Investment Company, a venture investment firm. Hon holds dual BS in electrical engineering and industrial engineering from Northwestern University and a MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

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    Most Recent Comments
    .NET News Desk 09/24/06 11:44:40 AM EDT

    Developing custom applications using Microsoft's .NET Framework is a growing trend. According to Forrester Research, 56% of enterprises are choosing .NET versus 44% opting for J2EE, while IDC reports that 35.7% of large corporations use .NET for their most important applications compared to 25.3% for Java. While .NET lets your development team develop applications quickly and efficiently, it's still a challenge to make sure that: