Chapter 13. Web-Centric Production Acceptance

You've recruited, hired , trained, and retained the best software engineers, architects , and managers in the industry. You've established a world class software development organization for these engineers to work in. You've bought the best software development tools money can buy and each developer has a top-of-the-line workstation and a private office. Your glass-house computer room is filled with high- powered file servers, DBMS servers, and the latest networking gear. Your software development team has worked for months to prototype, design, implement, and test a web-centric application, assuring every user requirement is met. You've worked with the IT operations staff to put in place a Service Level Agreement. Your long overdue vacation plans are looming on the horizon and it seems like your project is nearly complete. Surprise! There is still one more task to do before you can claim a successful web-centric software development project a very big task. We call it the Web-Centric Production Acceptance (WCPA) process.

The WCPA is our most important process. Implementing a WCPA process often makes the difference between the success or failure of a web-centric software development project. We have worked with many Fortune 500 companies who have attempted to deploy web-based applications, some successfully and others ending in project failure. Many of the failures were due to the absence of a process to deploy, manage, and support distributed, web-centric applications and their supporting infrastructure across the enterprise.

The WCPA started life as the Client/Server Production Acceptance (CSPA) process, described in Managing the New Enterprise . We have modified the CSPA process to specifically address the requirements of developers working on web-centric applications. Like the CSPA, the WCPA is our way of transitioning applications from development to production, i.e., deployment. It's also our way of making sure customers get the same reliability and security for their globally deployed Intranet, Extranet, and Internet applications as they did with their mainframe or client/server applications. The WCPA is our way of improving and maintaining IT and customer dialogue for systems support and development. Just as web-centric is a revolutionary computing paradigm, the WCPA is our contribution to a new age of IT customer relations enabled by personalized, web-based communications.