The initial infrastructure of Polarion products was based on SAP NetWeaver, and subsequently migrated to more community-based and open source platforms such as Subversion and Eclipse. Due to the huge attraction of the Chinese market and the localization needs of Chinese users, Polarion began to gradually spread their understanding of agile and ALM (application life cycle management) solutions in China.
Recently, Polarion's R & D VP Nikolay Entin (hereinafter referred to as Nick) came to China for the first time, and it was also his first time to Asia. Polarion ALM is Polarion’s core product and a software toolkit for full life cycle management. Polarion ALM tends to use open source software. Currently, more than 200 open source software or components are used in the Polarion ALM product series, and the number of community members has exceeded 10,000. Due to the huge market in China and the localization needs of Chinese users, Polarion has sought an exclusive agency in China, which is dedicated to serving Polarion users in China.
The following is a summary of the important content of an InfoQ reporter's recent interview with Polarion company Nick, which focuses on the practical guidance of agile development and expectations for future development, and also introduces the characteristics of Polarion ALM.
Thinking about Agile and expectations for the future
InfoQ: First, please give a brief introduction to Polarion.
Nick: Polarion was founded in 2004 and is a German company focused on providing ALM (application lifecycle management) solutions. Polarion's business was born out of SAP NetWeaver. But later, Polarion found that it was difficult to make money in this business, so it has now terminated its cooperation with SAP and no longer provides services to NetWeaver. However, for Polarion, through a series of cooperation, they have accumulated experience and increased the professional knowledge of relevant personnel. Now, Polarion's business platform is no longer based on SAP's NetWeaver, but based on open source platforms such as Subversion and Eclipse.
InfoQ: The topic of your speech at the Agile Conference is "Polarion's Seven Years of Agile Practice". So, could you please talk about the development of agile in Polarion and the development of agile development in China?
Nick: ALM is application lifecycle management, covering all aspects and aspects of software and hardware manufacturing. The commercial ALM product we provide is Polarion ALM. As the head of Polarion's R&D department, one of my main responsibilities is to improve the development labor efficiency of the company's entire R&D team. We switched to agile development seven years ago with the goal of improving labor efficiency. The tools we develop are provided for developers and developers to use, and we ourselves do software development, so we started with the tools and concepts of agile development throughout our own internal development process. Products to help our own users and customers improve their work experience.
I think China is also undergoing such an important transformation, turning to the direction of agile development. In the past, China was still a task-driven development model, passively accepting user instructions for development. Now we are turning to build a more comprehensive R&D function and improve Labor productivity, some of the traditional waterfall development models in the past are also slowly turning to agile development.
We can provide related tools, such as products that support XP or SCRUM, and provide professional consulting services according to user needs.
InfoQ: Traditional development is waterfall development. Now, taking mobile apps as an example, mobile development needs to be faster, and it only takes a few weeks from product initiation to development implementation. The current mobile application development market is very hot. What is the demand for ALM for this kind of mobile application development?
Nick: In fact, it is precisely in mobile development that ALM products and solutions can help these companies to focus their energy on mobile application development. Some of our tools can help them analyze the development progress. For example: For example, if you are developing a mobile application, you may only develop it for iOS and Android at the beginning. At the same time, you use a cross-platform development environment to ensure that it can be applied to other platforms after it is developed. At this time, you need to answer a question about whether we need to migrate to the Windows Mobile platform after development. Of course, this is not a problem from a programming perspective. You have already developed on a cross-platform platform. You only need to click a button and it will It is automatically written as an application under Windows Mobile.
Next, we need to understand the impact of such a new platform on the work, for example, what kind of adjustments its user interface has, because the clarity and resolution of different platforms are different; and then consider how long the test will take, and the new platform Next, do all the use cases need to be run again.
So if the developer has prior experience in iOS and Android, you can estimate how long it will take to transfer the software or application to Windows Mobile, and be aware of it, and see if this conversion can be done. Value for money or loss outweighs the gain.
In these areas, our tools can collect more information, analyze, and make more wise decisions. For example, when you develop Android and iOS, you already account for 2/3 of your development cycle, and the rest You can make a choice. Either you use 1/3 of the time to launch new features on iOS and Android, or use 1/3 for use case testing under Windows Mobile, so that after comparing our systems, developers can Make wise choices.
InfoQ: For Agile, how do you think about its future development?
Nick: I don't understand the situation in China. But in Germany and many other countries, I have communicated with many customers. When they talk about agile development, they all mention Scrum, but when they hear the actual operation introduced by them, it is still out of touch with Scrum. Of course they will use it. Iterative tools or methods, even sometimes involving game development, are different from the real Scrum.
So I don’t know if there may be such a situation in China: it was a popular vocabulary in the past, and everyone is not familiar with it. After everyone is familiar with it, the popularity has dropped, but the real application is still different from its reality.
In fact, there is another interesting development trend: some tools and methods are increasingly applied to the field of hardware manufacturing. A few years ago, when you talk about Scrum, you would think of software. Now the hardware is more and more widely used, especially the application of Scrum, for example In the area of 3D printing, 3D printing makes the production cycle shorter and shorter, which coincides with Scrum's high-efficiency development.
Strategic analysis and corresponding strategies for the ALM market
InfoQ: In the Chinese market, some other companies in ALM products have entered earlier, and they have seized some opportunities. Polarion wants to leverage their market in China, what is your corresponding strategy?
Nick: As far as I know, our products are competitive with HP's products. In the field of ALM, HP has a corresponding product, HP ALM, whose predecessor was called HP Quanlity Center, which was later renamed ALM.
In fact, we are very good at competing with big companies, because on the one hand, these big companies have a slower development speed. We are relatively faster in development and more efficient, and our products have more features. In addition, For large companies, such as Microsoft, IBM, and HP, they need to take up a lot of resources in terms of maintenance. We don't have such a historical burden, so we go faster.
On the other hand, there is a complementary relationship between our products and the products of large enterprises. For example, in terms of quality assurance, the relevant features of our products and product plug-ins are also complementary to HP ALM.
You may not have thought that HP itself is also one of our customers, they develop internal software and use our products, and we are originally a formal partnership.
In general, our advantage is that our products are open platforms, and all users can expand our products according to specific needs and situations; for HP, their advantage lies in test automation. , We do not provide similar functions, so there is still a lot of cooperation between us. Users can put forward requirements on the Polarion platform and then test, but in terms of test cases, call HP's related products and run under them. After the test is executed, the relevant test results must be returned to the Polarion platform.
Features of Polarion's ALM products
InfoQ: In the ALM market, it is inevitable that Polarion will compete with other giants. So, what are the characteristics of Polarion's ALM to participate in the competition?
Nick: First of all, we provide one-stop service. Our products are fully integrated and can meet ALM's full range of needs, but most of our competitors only provide solutions for some of the needs, and ultimately rely on users to integrate these needs or products.
The second point is that open source-based products have a very large user base, including the Subversion users just mentioned. I also believe that Subversion users in China should also be very wide.
Another advantage is that all our tools are browser-based user interfaces, that is, all information creation, management, and modification can be completed in this interface. End users do not need any other installations, and can use desktops and mobile devices. , Laptops, etc. can read this information.
Another feature is that the traceability of our products is particularly strong, because we use Subversion as the basis for data storage, and other company information is also stored there, so that we can establish associations between various artifacts and achieve cross-project Baseline management makes any modification of the artifacts traceable. You can answer questions like this at any time: who made the demand, how to implement it, why the demand was raised, and what was the situation at the time.
Finally, I think the biggest advantage is that we have the most advanced demand management functions. Polarion follows a method called "Live Information". We have many features with the title of Live: We have the LiveDoc feature, which means you can Online documentation; we have the LivePlan feature, which means you can use this planning tool to understand the progress of the entire project in real time.
Polarion's team situation and localization
InfoQ: Please tell us about Polarion's team building in China.
Nick: Polarion entered the Chinese market in March 2012, but we spent a lot of time on localization in the early stage and did not carry out substantial sales and marketing activities.
In 2016, Siemens announced an acquisition agreement with Polarion. Polarion is the first vendor to provide a browser-based application lifecycle management (ALM) enterprise solution. In the product development process of all walks of life, software is an indispensable and important part. Through ALM, manufacturing companies can continuously integrate, verify and verify the ever-increasing software content in their products. As a market leader in the ALM field, Polarion makes full use of the open architecture and provides support for open source development needs through the most advanced source code management technology.
As one of the world's leading product lifecycle management (PLM) software developers, Siemens will add the Polarion product portfolio to its Teamcenter® software, making ALM an integral part of the product development process. Through the acquisition of Polarion, Siemens will further strengthen its support for the system-driven product development process. System-driven product development is a holistic development method that can realize the integration of system engineering and integrated product definition in an open environment.
Polarion Software is a 100% browser-based, leading provider of a unified platform for demand, quality and application lifecycle management. Polarion is committed to helping innovators of products that people trust—organizations in various industries, from automobiles to medical equipment and aerospace, to achieve agility, traceability, and agility in the process of manufacturing highly complex products. Compliance.
In fact, we regard China as a strategically important market, and we have been trying to find the most suitable partner to carry out business in China on our behalf. Siemens has many agents, one of which is a gold medal agent team (namely, Shanghai Sotos Technology Co., Ltd., official website http://www.sotos.com.cn/ ), whether in the field of PLM or ALM, is more capable and can provide Better service.
InfoQ: Many large domestic companies have emphasized localization requirements in China. How much power do you give the Chinese team to support the localization of products and solutions?
Nick: Polarion products are a very open and flexible platform. We also hope to further expand the products according to the needs of local Chinese users. Localization, feature expansion, and rewriting are all done by the local team, and will not be outsourced. They are all done by Polarion's internal team in China.
In addition, localization is not only about translating related product features and user interfaces, but more importantly, we can convey our professional knowledge to China and integrate it with the actual situation in China. For example, we have a product, The software development process template is built-in, so for the specific situation in China, our development template will also be adjusted accordingly. On the one hand, it needs the professional knowledge of the entire industry, and it also needs the support of professional teams and local teams.
For example, if Chinese customers have requirements for new features, in most cases, it will be analyzed by the Chinese team and by our local experts, and then deployed.
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