Top 5 advantages of integrated ALM

Often ALM enterprises end up spending a lot of their investment on a massive amount of siloed point function tools that includes requirements management tools, architecture, coding, build testing, tracking and a whole lot more. The problem with these tools is that often they end up seeming too conventional and isolated. They tend to rely on age old manual procedures to enable synchronization of data betweens tools. This is precisely why enterprises need to integrate these multitudes of lifecycle tools to enable optimum application development. Here are the top 5 advantages that integrated Application lifecycle management (ALM) brings about:

• Visibility into application development: An integrated ALM can connect in a better way allowing teams, individuals and organization to gain better insight into the application development process. This means queries of reviews, findings, requirement of corrective actions, application retesting, test cases failures, etc can be ably answered.
• Enables Global Distributed Development: Even as ALM is getting into the global space, working in disparate and different cultures can affect productivity and there can be a strong chance of duplication of work. Hence integrated ALM can help overcome such challenges effectively by ensuring tools are integrated behind firewalls and across several diverse networks overcoming structural obstacles across remote locations. This means on time delivery of projects and also within the stipulated budgets.
• Enhances productivity: Integration of ALM can bring about better implementation and can help enforce processes to ensure better productivity. Repeated tasks can be automated, reducing any kind of tedious rework. Since stakeholders are up to date with all information there is also tremendous reduction in constant travelling for meetings etc.
• Makes Delivery swifter: With shorter development lifecycle, enhanced team collaboration, elimination of errors and reduction of human interfaces, delivery becomes quicker and meeting of deadlines becomes even easier.
• Enhanced Customer satisfaction: Integrated ALM means adoption of best practice processes. This allows all developmental activities to be aligned with customer requirements. Therefore the customer will always get what he wants. In addition the customer can also enjoy real-time updates on the progress and development of the ALM support lifecycle. Owing to enhanced levels of transparency, the customer can easily trace lifecycle artifacts across the development stages.

So you can spend dollars buying the best tools but can they truly make your development process more effective? The answer is no. Without synchronization between IT and your business, you will not be able to provide enhanced value to your customers. The solution therefore is to have automatically synchronized software and collaboration system.

Read more about integrated ALM at wikkipedia.
Also read about IT Service Management here

Kovair Plug-In For Eclipse Development Environment

Introduction

Eclipse is known as industry’s leading open source development platform for Java based software. Eclipse IDE is mostly used by the developers, and often they need to work together and share information with other stakeholders like – Business Analysts, Architects, Project Managers and Testers. With growing involvements of multiple stakeholders in almost all phases of software development lifecycle, today, it has become a challenge to ensure – collaborative development environment for the stakeholders, regardless of their geographic locations and roles. You also can’t rule out the necessities of adopting disparate Application lifecycle management tools, and often some of them are outside the scope of Eclipse environment! Now, the question is – ‘how do we enable Eclipse developers to share information back and forth with other stakeholders from within their familiar Eclipse environment?’

Kovair Plug-In for Eclipse Development

‘Kovair plug-in for Eclipse’, a platform for Eclipse developers, ensures collaboration among the stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle, and synchronization among disparate ALM tools. Working with this plug-in, the access of Eclipse developer scan be extended to other artifacts like – Requirements, Design Artifacts, Test Cases, Tasks and Defects originating from diverse ALM tools without leaving their preferred IDE. Kovair plug-in for Eclipse is a dream come true for Java developers who wish to use a single tool environment both for doing their primary development job and collaborating with other teams. This plug-in helps any organization to provide an enhanced platform to developers where its established processes, tools and practices can be seamlessly integrated.

Read more about Eclipse Development Environment at wikipedia.  
Also read more about IT Service Management here.

10 Basic Questions to Define Requirement Management Tool -- How Kovair Global Lifecycle Addresses Them

1. How do you add a Requirement to Kovair
In Kovair Global Lifecycle, you can define and add a Requirement in any of  following ways:
Using Rich Text Editor. The formatting includes fonts, color, table, bullets, and numbering, embedded images. Multiple Undo-Redo, symbols and embedded link to other Requirements. Additional Rich Text custom fields can be defined too. Submitting from your Corporate Website or Portal

• Sending by Email
• Importing from Microsoft Word Document
• Importing from Microsoft Excel spreadsheet
• Importing form a CSV file with configurable format
• Using any third party Requirement Management tool and other tools to define Requirements; and in real–time synchronizing the data with Kovair.

2. Are there specific attributes for each requirement
Yes, there are few System defined attributes for Requirements but more importantly Kovair Global Lifecycle Application Lifecycle Management solutions allows you to create as many user-defined or Custom Fields for the Requirements. Attribute Fields can be created based on the following data types some of which are typical but others (highlighted here) are unique to Kovair and lend to the power of Kovair configurability: Date, DateTime, Float, Float with 2 Decimal, Integer, Custom Lookup (Single and Multiple), Multi-Line Text, Single-Line Text, Calculated Field, Grid Field, Rich Text, Electronic Signature Field, Summary Field, and Relation Type Field.

3. What happens w hen you mark a requirement complete
That depends on the definition of the ‘Complete’. For some of our customers it means freezing the Requirements for a Release. For some others it means actual implementation of the Requirements, testing and finally releasing them. Using Kovair’s process automation you can define, implement a process for Requirements and include your definition of “complete”.

4. How do we know if a requirement is satisfied in the current product
Satisfying a Requirement means it has been successfully tested at different levels – Unit, Integration and Acceptance. Kovair allows Test Management by its built-in Test Management application or by integrating other 3rd party Test Management tools and have traceability relations between Requirements and Tests to track whether each Requirement is tested successfully.

5. Can requirements be prioritized
Yes, prioritization can be done manually by setting the Priority attribute for each Requirement or it can be done in a more structured and dynamic way:

• Collaborative Ranking: Using this feature, the Evaluators can individually rate a Requirement based on certain criteria. This helps in arranging the Requirements in the Priority List based on the score that each one has received from the evaluators during the evaluation phase.
• Decision Support System (What If Analysis): It supports business and organizational decision- making activities and helps the organization to prioritize requirements based on certain constraints into different buckets, e.g. Releases.
  
  

6. Does Kovair commit us to a specific philosophy of requirement management
No, Kovair Global Lifecycle is so flexible in terms of configurability that it can be fully configured to accommodate the client’s philosophy of managing requirements. Kovair does not follow any specific philosophy of Requirements Management; rather we implement the customer’s philosophy into the tool. Kovair has been configured to follow Waterfall, Agile and other proprietary methodologies.

7. How is a change request against a requirement handled
Change Request can be created as an entity in Kovair Global Lifecycle and just like Requirements all the features will be available for Change Request as well. Kovair can be configured to handle a Change Request process which is typically different from a Requirement Management process. Some of these changes are new enhancements which will end up being new requirements and others may be related to existing requirements. Using Kovair’s traceability relation the links may be setup between the Changes and related Requirements.

8. Can w e associate non-conformance to a requirement
Certain Custom Fields can be created for each of the non-conformance categories that can be used as a checklist kind of feature by the users to track different non-conformances to a requirement.

9. Can w e define a workflow for requirement revision process within the product
Yes, Kovair application has an inbuilt drag and drop Visual Workflow / Process designer that allows users to define a Task-based Process for not only Requirements but for each of the phases of the Application Lifecycle and automate them. During the Process execution, it automatically generates Tasks for the Roles or users as defined in the Process.

10. Can you keep track of costs (man hours and $$) for each requirement
Yes, there are a number of attributes provided by the tool, out of the box, for tracking the cost (Planned as well as Actual) of each Requirement. For example Planned Cost, Actual Cost, Planned Duration (in hrs), Actual Duration (in Hrs), Planned Work, Actual Work, etc. Additionally Kovair lets you create Custom Fields, of various data types that also can be used in this regard.

Read more about Requirements Management Tool at wikipedia.
Also read more about IT Service Management here.

Kovair Omnibus Integrations Middleware

Kovair Omnibus is the leading ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) integration technology available for Application Development and IT tools. This technology offers an open and seamless integration middleware with all essential Application lifecycle management services, like collaboration, traceability, process automation, security, reporting and analytics built on a single repository. With standardized SOA based tools specific Omnibus adapters, one can create one’s own tools ecosystem. These tools can be from any vendor or any legacy data or any custom homegrown application development and IT tools.

Kovair’s Omnibus integration bus technology has major advantages which are not typically found in the vendor specific point tools or even a suite of tools. They are :

• Bus or Hub versus point to point integrations bringing considerable savings in development and maintenance costs.
• Supports multi-directional Synchronization and Federation.
• Data validation and transformation.
• Customizable Integration Rules & Data Mapping independent of Adapters – No rule hardcode in the Adapter.
• Augment Integrated Tools’ capabilities for Process & Traceability.
• Leverages existing tools investment for customers – no need to rip and replace tools.
• Synchronization of data and relations between lifecycle artifacts in different tools.
• Conflict Detection and Mediation.
• Supports integrations of multiple tools for the same functional area.
• Connects tools behind firewalls through SOA – needed for globally distributed team.

We have shown below our entire portfolio of all multi-vendor tools for which integrations are currently available or expected to be available over the next 90 days across all functions of the software development lifecycle. It shows a very compelling picture for you to explore and benefit from.

Read more about Omnibus Integrations Middleware at wikipedia.  
Also read more about Requirements management tool here.

Gain Greater Insight with Integrated Application Lifecycle Management

Lack of visibility into day-to-day activities in application development is a big problem for all stakeholders. Business Analysts, Architects, Developers, Testers and Managers – all work in a very isolated manner using different tools and have limited information about the overall Application Lifecycle Management development activities and status.

Business Analysts don’t get answers to their questions –

• “Are there test cases covering the performance aspect of this customer requirement?”
• “Which customer requirements are designed, which ones coded and which are tested by now?”

Developers struggle to get their questions answered –

• “What was the detail customer discussion and business perspective for this functional requirement that I am developing?”
• “How many test cases failed for my code?”
• “How do I find which components are using this part of the code that I need to change to implement this new requirement?”
• “Which other requirements can reuse my piece of code?”
• “Can I see how similar requirements were developed in the past?”
• “Which other requirements management tool can be used to implement this new requirement?”

Testers find it difficult to get answers for their questions –

• “How do I know which other parts of the application need retesting when I am testing the fix for a bug?”
• “Is somebody working on fixing this bug and what is the current status? Is this recreated by the developer?”

Project Managers and Executives have limited visibility into the progress and quality of development projects. Whatever visibility they have is typically gleaned from subjective testimonials and is not based on any objective data.

“Are we on track to meet the delivery schedule? If not, what are the bottlenecks?”

 

“Are we doing enough reviews at every stage of the development? What are we finding?”

“What is the quality of the current release that we are working on? Which part is not stable yet? What corrective actions are needed?”

 

The information required to answer all the above questions are spread across disparate tools and locked in. All these tools need to be connected to unlock the hidden data and let the entire project stakeholders share the same pool of up-to-date real-time information. Connected ecosystem of tools allows every individual, team and organization to gain greater insight into the application development helping them to do their job much better in an informed way. Efficiency can only be achieved when the right people are on the right projects at the right time, doing the right things on the right items. This is impossible without a full visibility into projects, people, costs and items.

Read more about Integrated Application Lifecycle Management at wikipedia.  
Also read more about IT Service Management here.

Enhance Customer Satisfaction and Improve Quality With Integrated Application Lifecycle Management

Enhance Customer Satisfaction
Integrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) breaks down the developer/customer barrier, enables rapid delivery of customer-driven value and results in better customer satisfaction.

• Integration enables business stakeholders and developers to collaborate seamlessly with the customers around common shared artifacts. This provides the opportunity to understand customer needs and expectations better.

• Best practice processes adopted throughout the lifecycle stages constantly ensure that all the development activities are aligned with the ultimate customer requirements. Customers get exactly what they have asked for.

• Improved quality achieved through the integration helps to deliver a better product to the customer that works for their business to rely upon.

• Customer gets real time updates on the application development progress and status because of the increased transparency and visibility into the lifecycle stages. Software quality and reliability are lifelines to customer loyalty.

• Integration facilitates quick response to customer requests and requirements with the support of an end-to-end traceability of lifecycle artifacts across the stages and integrated change management process.

• Integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and HelpDesk tools provides complete transparency on the progress of customer cases to all lifecycle stakeholders including customer support managers, sales and the entire software development team. This helps organizations to be on top of customer issues. Customer will instantly know the status of issues and when the fixes will be deployed.
  
  

Improve Quality
Integrating the application development lifecycle tools has direct and indirect influences on the overall quality. It improves quality by reducing the number of defects due to miscommunication, catching inconsistencies between requirements, enabling efficient testing, and generally ensuring that the final application meets the needs and expectations of users. Quality is a result of effectiveness, efficiency and visibility.

• Accomplishing tasks with quality outcome, often requires wider vision and extended accessibility to related information/knowledge base. In an IT environment, linked information from disparate tools needs to be exposed to right stakeholders at the right time – for them to come up with ‘Quality’, and this plays a big role behind the success of IT projects. With integration; architects, developers and testers have ready real-time access to the lifecycle artifacts from within their tool, and hence become more informed to do better design, coding and testing activities. All these result in better software quality.

• Integration ensures code quality and performance throughout the lifecycle process. Quality of work is validated at every stage and defects are caught during the process, instead of at the end of it.

• Enforce and automate some of the best practice quality verification processes like code analysis, unit testing, checking code coverage, continuous build verification, root cause analysis and more by integrating the relevant tools. Capture these detail level test results/defects to analyze and take smarter decisions to improve quality.

• Strong analytics help anticipate problems before they arrive.

Better change management practices help to minimize quality issues arising out of
changes in requirements management, requirements management tools,  designs and code files. It is key to understand change dependencies and impacts to optimize quality.

Read more about Integrated Application Lifecycle Management  at wikipedia.  
Also read more about IT Service Management here.

Kovair Global Lifecycle

Implementation :

Kovair Global Lifecycle provides  several validation  checks, and  full  audit  trail,  as well  as automated  monitoring “policies”  that check values  to be within  specified norms of  validity. The policy engine will notify appropriate authorized personal on changes recorded in the system. Complete logging. All changes are logged for reporting.  Kovair  Global  Lifecycle  provides web-based  and  report-based interfaces  to  obtain  records  in  hum  readable  for  or inspection, review  and copying. The system also generates electronics form for the records through file based export of the data. Kovair Global Lifecycle allows users to have ready retrieval of the data at anytime through the application interface.  Protection of the data is managed by the Database and Database Administrator. Kovair  Global  Lifecycle employs  the strategy  of access groups to  limit  each  authorized  user' s  access  to  data  and functionality.

Kovair  Global  Lifecycle  maintains  a  rich  audit  trail  of  all events  performed  in the  system. The  system  will automatically  track  actions  that  involve  creating, modifying  or deleting  an electronic  record,  and will  capture  the  time-stamp, operator, and values changed. Subsequent changes to the records accumulate to the existing audit-trail and will not obscure the previously recorded information in any way.  This information is readily available to the agency through the Kovair Global Lifecycle user interface or through reports. Kovair Global Lifecycle allows the organization to create an  enforceable  and  repeatable  process,  through  it' s process engine, which  will  determine  the  sequence  of  steps  and events, as appropriate. Kovair Global Lifecycle employs the strategy of user names and passwords to authenticate and authorize users of the system. User names are tied to access groups within the system to limit access to data and functionality as desired.

Kovair Global Lifecycle application only accepts data from validated process components and services installed with the system. Kovair Global Lifecycle provides on-site training on the operation of the system to enable users to perform their assigned tasks within the system.  Kovair Global Lifecycle also provides embedded, context-sensitive help with the system to guide users. Written policies are established by each client organization. Kovair Global Lifecycle ' s access groups and audit trail  logs can  be  incorporated  into  those  policies  to  assist  with compliance.    

This section refers to each organization’s systems    administration areas.

(1)  Kovair Global Lifecycle provides installation, administration, configuration and end user documentation with the system deployment.  On-site and Web-based training is also provided to educate individuals on system operation and maintenance.
(2) Configuration changes made to Kovair Global Lifecycle post deployment are subject the change control procedures enforced by the client organization.  Kovair Global Lifecycle will  log  all changes  made  in  the  audit-trail  to  assist  with compliance.

Read more about Kovair Global Lifecycle at gantthead.com  
Also read more about Application lifecycle management  and IT Service Management here.

The Kovair 6.0 Value Proposition for Tools Integrations

Introduction
Kovair, a technology leader in the Applications Lifecycle Management –ALM and IT Service Management – ITSM offers several solutions such a Requirements Management, Test Management, Issues Management Solutions and Change Management Solutions, Help Desk, Incidents and Problem Management. Kovair is known for its following four technology value propositions, no matter what the specific application or solution. 100% web based architecture that supports multiple major browsers with no client side software installation Drag and drop code less configurable entities that allow easy configurations for desired applications making it a very viable and flexible long term investment with very high ROI. An excellent Task based, built in Process or  Automated Work flow Tool or Engine which we call the ‘Omni process’ that allows process capabilities to be added to any application (and multiple ones in parallel).An Enterprise Service Bus or Integration Bus called the ‘Omnibus’ that is SOA architecture based. It facilitates integration of Kovair with any third party tool or software by building thin adapters that allow bi- directional data transfer between Kovair and the third party software and bring it into the single repository of Kovair for any technical, management or reporting reasons.With the above basics of Kovair succinctly outlined, let us focus in this particular paper on the value proposition of the Enterprise Integration Bus – the Omnibus.

The Omnibus Integrations
It is generally well known that in the entire product development life cycle, developers work in isolation or silos based on their functions, technology, geographic or plant locations. Another way of explaining this would be to say that the Requirements Management tools do not talk to Test Management tools and the test management tools do not talk to the Issues or Bug tracking tools. The same could be said about the IT Service Management side of the organization.

Kovair helps to resolve this issue in two dimensions. For multiple Kovair solutions, Kovair comes with a single data repository so that the data for Requirements, test, issues and other ALM entities resides in the same repository and it is therefore easy to get an integrated picture of various aspects of the development life cycle. However, this is not the case in real life as most organizations use the best of breed tools from multiple vendors which seldom have inter connected and data transferability unless point to point integrations are carried out. Even different tools from the same vendor are not typically connected with each other. So, this is where the second dimension of Kovair’s integration capability comes into use by way of the Omnibus technology.

To eliminate the need for point to point integrations – where integrating 5 different tools requires 10 total integrations, Kovair developed the Omnibus technology that is SOA based. In a bus or hub architecture for integrations, 5 integrations require only 5 adapters and thus bring considerable savings in both development and maintenance costs for upgrades for new versions of tools. The SOA technology based Omnibus is data base, technology, vendor and location agnostic. Thus, Kovair can be integrated with other tools that may be using Oracle or Linux data bases, or can be located anywhere as Kovair’s web based architecture facilitates remote communication and collaboration. In today’s multi locations as well as outsourced development environment, it is important that a Requirements Management tool based in Boston can communicate with a Test tool based in Bangalore. The Kovair Omnibus technology is very capable of delivering on this essential need.

The Advantages of the Omnibus Technology
The omnibus technology has a few unique advantages that are enumerated below.
Bus or Hub versus point to point integrations as discussed above bringing considerable savings in development and maintenance costs Web Services Standard or SOA architecture makes it open to any type of software from any vendor including home grown tools or data bases for integrations Kovair has developed a “Tools Class API” to make integrations with other tools relatively easy once the APIs for other tools are available. The data layer is separated from the business layer and as such no hard coding of business rules has to be carried out for the integrations. Business rules are configured for each application as desired by the user.The Omnibus integrations enhance the capabilities of other tools by way of introducing process capabilities that Kovair has built in to other tools that may not have a process engine.

Read more about Kovair Automated Workflow Tool  at cmcrossroads.com

INTEGRATION OF PERFORCE SOFTWARE CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (SCM) WITH KOVAIR GLOBAL LIFECYCLE

SCM tool is one of the most widely used and indispensable tools in a software development organization of any size. However, for a complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), SCM is just one of many such tools critical for success. Kovair Global Lifecycle offers a number of such critical built-in ALM applications including Requirements Management, Test Management, Change Management, Issues Management, and Release Management and their tools such as Requirements Management tools,Test Management tool, Issue Management tool. Integration of a SCM tool with Kovair Global Lifecycle therefore provides an unprecedented ecosystem for a development organization. Perforce is one of the leading SCM tools known for its performance and flexibility. This paper describes the details of the integration between Perforce and Kovair and the benefits the Perforce users and the whole development group get out of this integration. The users of other SCM tools can expect a similar set of benefits from the integration of the particular SCM tool with Kovair Global Lifecycle. Kovair has created the Perforce adapter using its industry leading Omnibus Integration Bus technology. Omnibus ensures a vendor neutral ALM Platform. Significant features of Kovair Omnibus Technology are – Bus Architecture, Web Service standards (using SOAP protocol), and tool–specific API. So, any third party tool can be integrated with Kovair Global Lifecycle, by creating an adapter.The integration has been achieved by creating an Omnibus Adapter – specific to Perforce SCM. The adapter maintains two way communications of data between Kovair Global Lifecycle and Perforce SCM.

Kovair Integration with Perforce

The adapter is a lightweight interface expositing the internal data schema of Perforce. There is no hard coded business logic in the adapter. This makes the same adapter highly adaptable to various business needs for different organizations. The business rules are defined using the Kovair Service Flow user interface and does not need any coding. The beauty of separating out the data layer (adapter) and the business rule layer (Service Flow) is that the end users e.g. business analysts or the development managers can define and redefine business rules without changing the adapter. The business rules for the transmission of data across the tools are defined by the Service Flow. It is the conditional logic of how tools will behave on real-time events. Service Flows are fully customizable,according to business needs, and it does not require writing a single line of code. As and when an event matches with a Service Flow trigger, data gets replicated from Kovair to Perforce or vice versa. Kovair’s Omnibus Integration bus technology can be used with synchronization or two-way replication between Kovair and Perforce SCM. For example, by synchronization the Change lists in Perforce can be synchronized with the Change lists in Kovair - which means a Change list added or edited in Kovair is replicate in Perforce SCM and vice versa. However, for all items, synchronization is not desirable, especially if the data content is too big in size. Hence, for the source files in Perforce SCM, a different strategy is used. Only the information about the files and Not the file content is replicated in Kovair. When the content is needed Omnibus requests Perforce to get the actual content of the particular file on-demand. This method allows the actual data to remain in Perforce SCM’s repository and fetched only when needed. This method is called Federation.

Read more about Software Configuration Management (SCM) at Wikkipedia.
Also read more about  IT Service Management here.

MULTI-TOOL INTEGRATION -An Integration bus technology

An Integration bus technology allows a multi-tool integration in bus architecture. It also offers a significant savings in integration effort and cost over ad-hoc point-to-point integrations since the number of distinct integration code pieces for integration bus is ‘n’ which is substantially less than n*(n-1)/2 for point-to-point integration for ‘n’ number of tools.

• Integration Bus allows for a two way total synchronization between two tools for a particular Entity. This two way synchronization is necessary to keep all the information current in both tools.

• Integration Bus enables integration between multiple tools managing the same type of items. For example a transparent synchronization among multiple Requirements Management tools will keep the particular users of each tool aware of what is happening in the other tools.

• Integration Bus synchronizes not just the data but also relations between items Synchronization of data is just the starting point of any meaningful integration.  A bigger value is gained by synchronization of the relations among these data.

• Integration Bus allows business rule to decide when and what to replicate across different tools. For example not all Requirements need to be replicated from the Requirements management tool to the Test management tools but only those which are approved.

• Integration Bus enables federation of data in terms of getting the data from other repositories on-demand. It is not necessary or even desirable to have all data from all tools to be replicated in the other tools. An on-demand access of data allows minimization of the data replication and network traffic.
  
  

Read more about Integration bus technology at wikipedia.  
Also read more about IT Service Management here.

Integrated Application Lifecycle Management, - A case for ALM Middleware

Introduction
One of the most desirable aspects of software development process for the last decade has been Integrated Application Lifecycle Management-ALM. Integrated ALM today is also known as End-To-End ALM in some vendor literatures and websites. Fulfilling this promise by various vendors has been patchy at best. However, in the last 2 years, things are changing as new technologies are maturing in highly critical production systems, there by bringing some of the long overdue benefits of Integrated ALM to real development. Today,  if an organization is not thinking about integrated ALM, it is missing some compelling  benefits, which are discussed in a companion White paper from Kovair “10 Benefits  Of Integrated ALM Solutions”.

In this paper, we will discuss three widely used approaches provided by different vendors over time towards achieving Integrated ALM and the relative merits of these solutions. We will especially focus on a new integration technology - ALM Middle ware for achieving an Integrated ALM for a mixed vendor tools environment.

In a software development process, various tools are used both for managing the development process as well as for the actual creation and testing of software code.

Following is a list of such tools some of which are generic (e.g. Document Management) and some are very specific to software development (e.g. Debugger/ Profiler):

• Ideation/ Idea Management Tool
• Requirements Elicitation Tool
• Requirements Management Tool
• Design and Modeling Tool
• IDE (Integrated Development environment)
• Unit Test Tool
• Project Management Tool
• Document Management Tool
• Build Tool
• Configuration Management Tool
• Test Management Tool
• Test Automation Tool
• Debugger/ Profiler
• Issues Management Tools/ Change Management Tool
• Help desk Tool
• Time sheet Tool

These tools either generate or manage different objects necessary for managing the ALM process. The objects include Requirements for Requirements Management, Test cases for Test Management and Source files for Configuration Management. In this document we will refer to these objects as ALM Artifacts or Artifacts.

Since we are still in a nascent stage of Integrated ALM support  systems and competing vendors are trying to establish the concepts, the best way to define such concepts is to focus on the results of implementing such a system.

Read more about Integrated Application Lifecycle Management at wikipedia.  Also read more about IT Service Management here.

Benefits and functionalities of Integrated Application Lifecycle Management System

View artifacts managed by one Tool from another Tool.

Examples include list of Test cases from the Requirements Management Tool and Requirements from the Test case Management Tool, or list of design objects from the IDE. The benefit is even higher when multiple artifacts are accessible from a single tool.

Each individual stakeholder gets the benefit of accessing the artifacts from other tools without leaving their natural tool environment. This promotes collaboration and early problem detection, which can save a lot of errors and money.

Create various impacting and non-impacting relationships between
any two Artifacts.
This can manifest in creating a Traceability relation between a Requirement in Requirements Management Tool and Test case in the Test Management Tool; so that when the Requirement changes in one tool the Test case in the other tool will be flagged for impact. Another example is creating a dependency relation between a Change Request in an Issue / Change Management tool and the source code in the Configuration Management tool to track what files are modified to implement the Change.

Without this Traceability, the QA group could be testing an obsolete Requirement without being aware of it. In addition, without this feature, questions like “why a single source file is affected by so many defects?” cannot be answered.

Automate a process cutting across the tool boundaries and implement a complete ALM lifecycle without a break.

For example: a Change which starts its life in a Helpdesk tool as a Ticket, gets automatically replicated as a Change Request in the Issues Management tool /Change Management tool, gets approved by a Change Control Board, goes to the architect to create/ modify architectural artifacts in the Designer/ Modeling tool, goes to the developer for coding and to QA for creating Test cases in IDE and Test Management tools.

It is imperative to have an automated process workflow drive this across tool boundaries even when individual tools lack the processing capability. Without this process automation, the manual interfaces between tools are managed typically by emails and unstructured documents, inevitably resulting in dropping the ball at times.

Manage Projects and Resources across the tools.

For development managers, it has always been a vexing question to answer ‘For a set of Requirements, Changes and Defects what will be the Release date given a set of Resources?’ Alternatively, the questions can be posed as ‘Given a set of Resources and a Release date, what Requirements, Changes and Defects can we put in this release?’ or ‘Given a Release date and a set of Requirements, Changes and Defects, what kind of resources do we need?’ We can make it even more complex by incorporating design and modeling objects, test automation and other Application Lifecycle Management artifacts in the mix. Since the artifacts involved are managed by various tools, only an Integrated ALM system will be able to  handle this question.
Without an Integrated ALM, performing Project and Resource Management against just one artifact, say Requirements, will give an incomplete and wrong picture. The traditional PPM (Project Portfolio Management) software tool fails to take care of this because of a lack of integration with all other individual ALM tools.

Create Cross tools Analytics and Dashboards.

A Project manager’s assessment regarding the health of a particular development project can be massively flawed unless he/she takes into account the activities in all the tools involved. Analytics and reporting across various tools is very important at different levels including that of the CxO.

For example, an Integrated ALM system should be able to produce a Test compliance report for the end customer, who shows the list of Customer Requirements, Change Requests and Issues, traced to Test cases and individual Test runs. And finally, the Test run results should show that they have all passed. To produce a report like this requires retrieving information from various tools including Requirements Management, Issues / Change Management, Test Management and Test Automation.

Now that we have discussed the advantages of an Integrated ALM, we will next discuss three widely used options by vendors for achieving Integrated ALM, and how these options address the above functionality and benefits.

Read more about Integrated Application Lifecycle Management at wikipedia.
Also read more about IT Service Management here.