Micro Focus' online Application Value Profile (AVP) is a newly launched self-assessment tool aimed at development team seniors looking to improve their lifecycle process parameters.

Micro Focus has made it clear that it recognizes the issues faced by software development teams caught between pressures to produce more software, increase quality, and meet rigid schedules while simultaneously controlling or even reducing costs.

With this challenge in mind, the company's AVP methodology sets out to profile and analyze an organization's software development lifecycle relative to the business expectations facing the software development group. This practice, in theory, provides an opportunity to examine all potential improvement opportunities and then prioritize and isolate a few practices to focus on initially.

After completing an online profile, Micro Focus says that users are presented with a free, pragmatically aligned PDF report that details peer comparisons around technology maturity, a profile of critical performance indicators, and recommendations for next steps to help continue the application value path.

According to Micro Focus, "The complimentary Application Value Profile is an objective analysis that helps organizations identify improvement opportunities to ensure maximum return from their software development and testing investments. It probes into an organization's business issues and processes in Project Management, Requirements Management, Change and Configuration Management, and Quality Management. The AVP provides a strategy for improving development and testing capability and estimating the potential business value of change. Compared with other models, the AVP's pragmatic approach is transparent and its insights provide a basis for developing a concrete, achievable plan for improvement."

So how does it work?

The "industry and geographically agnostic" online AVP uses a set of targeted questions to evaluate three key IT disciplines of an organization — requirements, change processes, and quality — against industry trends. Results are customized and illustrated graphically to provide a representation of an organization's agility, productivity, and business alignment.

So it's all free and Micro Focus just stands back?

Of course not. Based on this evaluation, users can then receive recommendations from Micro Focus on initial steps for improving agility, productivity, and alignment between disparate lines of business and IT — moving beyond the standard improvement roadmap to provide a quantitative business value profile and the basis for developing the potential ROI associated with development and testing processes and technology improvement opportunities.

"Businesses of every size and in every industry are looking for new ways to reduce the cost of operations, while continuing to attract, serve, and satisfy valuable customers. As a result, CIOs are more dependent than ever on IT departments and software developers to ensure that their business-critical applications are supporting strategic growth objectives in a cost-effective manner," Richard Novak, president of Micro Focus, North America."

"The Micro Focus Online Application Value Profile empowers users to see how their application practices stack up against competition and provides the opportunity to go one step further to determine specific return on investment and recommend immediate steps towards achieving agility and efficiency."