A challenging economic environment and higher demands of end users have increased the pressure on software companies to move faster while similarly reducing their development cost. It is therefore crucial today for the use of agile software development, i.e. to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in a productive and cost-effective way. In the context of cloud computing, agility often refers to the ability to rapidly develop, test and launch software applications. Compared to on premise software development, cloud based software development requires shorter development cycles and the ability to access data created by the deployed applications in order to instantly get feedback on resource consumption, performance, and the application's usage while still enhancing and extending the software.
The goal of Feedback-Driven-Development is to utilize application related feedback data in the ongoing development process. This feedback data is produced by versions of the application that are already deployed in the cloud environment.
With the help of feedback data, cloud developers can evolve their software continuously in an informed way, based on actual usage, minimize operational disruptions and shorten the number of deployment cycles. Feedback-Driven-Development will therefore support the typical agile and fast evolving development in the cloud context, making application development for the cloud more efficient and more directed towards the users’ needs. This has a direct influence on the cost structure of development.
CloudWave is developing a set of feedback tools as a Proof-of-Concept for Feedback-Driven-Development. These tools will be integrated into an already existing cloud development environment and will showcase the advantages of Feedback-Driven-Development concepts based on actual industrial use cases.
