In today’s rapidly changing business environment, time is money. Failure to be agile enough to exploit a narrow window of opportunity can prove to be expensive for a business. In such desperate times, if an average product delivery takes 4 to 9 months, then a company’s competitiveness can go for a spin.
Several software process models have been proposed since the dotcom revolution. And while a majority of these are based on the development and maintenance of the software product, there lies a need for a more efficient approach. Why? Because the existing approaches prove to be problematic in a large number of software projects. As they do not meet their expectation in terms of functionality, cost, delivery schedule, and in most cases, effective project management appears to be lacking. This gives rise to what we call Fusion Development, let’s understand what it is and how it works.
Fusion Development is a methodology used to empower both your development and business teams to create better software, faster. It brings together citizen developers (also called low-code developers), professional developers, and the other stakeholders involved in building and using applications to define the objectives of the project.
The process can be vaguely understood as follows. A citizen developer addresses business needs quickly by building an app and working with a professional developer to fill in the gaps. Once an initial prototype is built, end users are asked to provide feedback on missing functionality and any changes that are necessary. The whole process is highly iterative, perhaps more so than many popular agile processes, with even the possibility of incorporating several iterations in a single day.
Fusion development relies heavily on the knowledge and abilities of different members across multi-disciplinary teams. This helps this approach in gaining significant synergies through efficient communication, autonomy, and development in an agile fashion.
Steps Involved in Fusion Development
Fusion development focuses on applications that can be quickly built and easily managed. And there are certain steps that we must account for if we want to opt for it.
Step 1: Model and Analyze
Having a common understanding of how the particular business functions, which applications and people should be involved, and what the responsible business drivers are, is an essential element of Fusion development. This requires involving the key business stakeholders with their IT counterparts to collaborate and iron out any differences in the project understanding.
Ideally, at the end of this stage well-defined process models, schemas, and Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs) are achieved. Having this also eliminates any concerns that IT can’t deliver against the business requirements and ensures that there are no discrepancies among business units.
Step 2: Develop the Data Stream
Data plays a very important role in the concept of assembling applications. In this step, we build a portfolio of reusable data, business processes, and application services. Without this, it would be impossible to execute the project as data (in any form) acts as the building blocks to compose new applications with utmost speed and flexibility.
Step 3: Enable Transparency
Business decisions are driven by insight. During this step, we must gather insights and deliver them to the business user using business intelligence, event-driven architecture, and BAM, etc. Here, by using real-time and historical intelligence, business users monitor the health of a business and take corrective actions (if any).
Step 4: Build! Build! Build!
Here, users get a personalized view of their dashboard in a rich, Web 2.0 environment. It brings together content, workflow, and dashboards and offers a seamless UI experience.
Step 5: Iterate and Improvise
After releasing the initial prototype, feedback is collected from relevant stakeholders. This feedback serves tremendous value to the project scope, improving product features and functionalities on successive cycles.
Benefits of Fusion Development
1. Launch Faster
The agile functionality of fusion development enables rapid prototyping. This in turn means that products can be brought to market much faster as compared to traditional programming.
2. Align business and IT
Fusion development facilitates the ultimate partnership between business and IT. Through this, both sides make the most of their unique skills and experience.
3. Easy to Pivot
By “pivot,” we mean changing the application’s target market or audience. If a business decides tomorrow that a particular app will work well for another target market, we can make the switch without changing the architecture completely. This gives a business the freedom it requires to start building immediately, promoting flexibility to adjust and redirect whenever needed.
In a nutshell, there’s no need for a business to spend endless hours redefining the structure of the process. And instead, quickly jump on to building the app which will also allow them to make changes along the way.
4. Enable citizen development
No one understands business processes better than business-side employees. And by including this unique insight in the software development process, a greater value can be brought into the system. It’s called citizen development and no code tools make it easily possible in the fusion development process.
5. Saves a lot of money
Budget allocation is a pain, especially when times are desperate. It is refreshing to realize that with fusion development, you don’t have to compromise on the output once you adapt to no-code applications.
6. Encourages innovation
Once we start engaging in fusion development, the complete process can be super easy and fun to engage with. And given the fact that the business users can now build solutions for their unique problems themselves, it promotes a culture of innovation in an organization.
To summarize, fusion development is intended for enterprise organizations that are serious about building advanced solutions, who are innovation-focused, and who want to be leaders in their fields. It’s a solution that addresses the challenges of using traditional development methods. It also promotes adding new benefits and possibilities to the existing development process among organizations across the globe.