Understanding the Benefits of ALM Middleware Technology

As there are not many vendors who are able to deliver the promise of a point-to-point integration architecture, it is the ALM Middleware technology that can help achieve an Integrated ALM or End-To-End ALM for a mixed vendor tools environment. There are diverse tools used for managing the development process as also for the actual creation, testing, building and deployment of software codes, in a software development process, typically. While avoiding all issues and pitfalls of point to point and single vendor integrations, the concept of ALM middleware addresses all the Integrated ALM requirements and offers some more benefits.

The middleware technology being based on Enterprise Service Bus , has a few advantages over any point-to-point integration architecture. Application Lifecycle Management Integration Middleware keeps together the various tools that are used throughout the application development lifecycle. With an ALM middleware technology, the benefits are:

* Development is simplified

The middleware technology reduces the number of tools and the number of pair integrations between tools.

* Investments are protected

The ALM Middleware is based on a standard set of web service based APIs and can integrate tools from different vendors, including internally developed tools. This results in the protection of tool investment.

* It permits the right tool for the right function

As ALM Middleware allows integration of multiple tools from different vendors for the same function, it also supports simultaneous usage of multiple tools from multiple vendors in a single tools ecosystem, thereby organizations to select the best tools.

* Allows flexibility of business rules

For numerous reasons integration business rules change over time, which also result in the change in business conditions, group dynamics and development methodologies. The business rules that are managed in middleware administrative module, eliminates the need for development resources for changing the integration codes and decreases the change implementation time significantly from weeks to hours.

* Simplifies the creation of traceability

ALM Middleware simplifies the creation of traceability relation between artifacts from various tools. Due to a central framework, there is a flexibility in creating and managing these relationships among multiple tools which promotes multi-tool proactive and reactive change impact analysis.

* Permits process automation without boundaries

With its built-in process automation capability, ALM Middleware has the unique advantage of creating a cross tools process and automating the same for a transparent no-overhead implementation with a much larger success potential. The entire process is automated for all these users when they are using different tools and from different locations.

* Permits the creation of dashboard metrics

Create all sorts of dashboard metrics and reports for those data in real-time is possible, once ALM Middleware has all the artifacts and meta information about the artifacts. These reports give valuable insight about the whole cross-tool process.

ALM Middleware technology is the leading integration technology in the ALM industry today, this method of ALM Middleware is the most suitable for implementing Integrated ALM in organizations having or needing multiple vendor tools. Unlike point-to-point integrations, middleware adapters do not have any embedded business rules, where the logic is hard coded in the integration codes. ALM solutions such as Middleware permit creation and management of these rules that are independent of the individual tool adapters.

Learn more about: - software as a service saas & Change Management

Understanding the Significance of an Integrated ALM

Although you may have purchased the best tools money can buy to make your development process more effective, they may not be talking to each other. This could lead to tremendous problems as every group works in isolation. You will not have a consolidated picture of the complete development project, but only the pieces of the puzzle. To avoid this, integration of tools becomes absolutely essential. By integrating your application lifecycle management tools you can not only view artifacts managed by one tool from another tool, but also automate processes cutting across the tool boundaries. Integration also helps in creating various impacting and non-impacting traceability relation, creating cross tools Analytics, Metrics and Dashboards and actionable intelligence. Lack of reliable data is no more a blind spot for project and resource management across the tools.

Understanding the significance of an integrated ALM
A cost-effective, flexible and user-friendly integrated ALM does away with complex and costly tools integrations, and overcomes the limitations of the existing point-to-point and single-vendor tools integrations. By providing a lot of advantages, the integrated ALM has immense significance.

• An integrated ALM considerably simplifies development

As an efficient integrated ALM is based on the ESB architecture, there is a reduction in the number of tools and the pair of integrations between the tools.

• An integrated ALM secures investments

The familiarity of people using these tools is also protected from an investment perspective as the tool investments by a development organization are enhanced with integrations and the training. The ALM middleware can integrate tools from different vendors without any particular prerequisite on the tools.

• An integrated ALM facilitates multiple third party tools from various vendors

An integrated ALM allows the best breed of tools for the best functions. As it supports concurrent usage of several tools from several vendors in a single tool ecosystem, the organizations are allowed to select best-of-breed tools available in the market.

• An integrated ALM allows creation and management of business rules

There is flexibility in the integration of business rules as unlike point-to-point and single-vendor integrations where the logic is hard coded in the integration codes, middleware adapters do not
have any hard coded embedded business rules and are easily configurable.

• An integrated ALM permits managing Traceability between artifacts from multiple tools.

An integration bus technology permits creating and managing Traceability relationships between artifacts from various tools, unlike a point to point integration, where only two tools are integrated at a time. A supple omnibus technology promotes multi-tool proactive and reactive Change impact analysis.

With an ability to integrate multiple tools on the bus for the entire development & IT Lifecycle, an efficient application lifecycle management solution supports a two-way synchronization and federation and a comprehensive and user-friendly Web inter

Learn more about :- integration bus

Importance of Reusability and Requirements Collaboration within ALM

Did you know that Requirements Management can actually make or break the ultimate success of the project in a distributed software and systems development project? An efficient and optimized requirements management tool can be a life-saver for any project. Collaboration and reusability are 2 main elements of Requirements Management that can greatly assist in a distributed project. With a collaborative Requirements Management that is equipped with a high degree of reusability can significantly decrease the development time and risks.

So what exactly is the role of collaboration within requirements management? Collaboration is the basis for working together to share information and to accomplish common tasks. For today’s software development practices, “Collaboration” among different groups / roles working from diverse geographic locations has almost become a necessity. And among all phases of software development life cycle, it is the Requirement Management phase that greatly demands collaboration since there are globally distributed stakeholders who are required to be involved in creating, reviewing and approving of all Requirements. Therefore enterprises would get better results if they opt for a Collaborative Knowledge Management Infrastructure for their distributed teams. Such ALM solutions or infrastructure would be backed by a single web-based application that can effectively cover all the features necessary for all asynchronous collaboration.

An application lifecycle management solution that is a 100% web-based customizable solution that can ably offer multiple avenues to work collaboratively to manage requirements is a best bet for any enterprise. The idea is to allow users to access the Requirement Management solution from remote locations and enable optimized collaboration across geographically distributed teams. Also a broader versioning of Requirements can offer better and broader spectrum for projects. Generally within Requirement Management, the milestones can be set by creating Baselines on regular interval which enables the archiving of the history of Requirements so that easy referral and comparison is possible even on a later date.  So for example, even if 6 months down the line, if the management wishes to view the contents of the set of Requirements as it was on the Project kick off date, they can easily refer to the baseline drawn on the kicked off date.

With a flexible baseline such reports can be easily generated as of any arbitrary point in time to show the status of an ongoing project. Additionally it also provides the functionality to compare two baselines drawn on two different dates so that the management team gets an insight of all the changes occurred in the Project between two dates.

Learn more about Requirement Management Tools & Requirements traceability matrix here.

An Integrated Approach for Better Project Management

Almost every industry has inculcated the practice of project management to overcome the difficulties of managing budgets, time and resources. Project management is defined as “the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques applied to project activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations from a project.” Projects can be affected adversely if all issues connected with project management are not integrated efficiently. Lack of effective methods or failed attempts at managing tasks are usually the reason for the failure of a project. By just defining a project suitably, most enterprises often face their fundamental challenge.

For better results in project management, an integrated approach is the best suited method. By opting for a solution that can help manage tasks in a more efficient manner, enterprises can try to overcome any failed attempts.  A definite advantage for any enterprise would be an optimized solution that could offer task management solutions and ensure that tasks and their follow ups are easily managed with limited resources. Enterprises require a solution that permits both manual and automated tasks’ allocation without difficulty for all the various stakeholders, be it a requirements management tool or test management or issue management or risk management. The primary aim should be facilitating a methodical and planned workflow management in a distributed environment

Choosing an integrated solution can help assist in creating numerous tasks for several resources or rules for a specific item of a project. Integrated tools can design custom tasks as well as define parallel Tasks for same or different sets of resources. A solution offering uncomplicated ways of navigation to represent a link to any item on the task form can be highly beneficial to an enterprise. Typically resources need a lot of information on record to complete a task. To help the resource to work independently and reduces spare dialogues among the workgroup, all that is needed is a one-click access of record from the Task. Approvals and rejections can be done easily when a solution also offers an in in-built Timesheet also tracks time entries against the Task allocated to resources. This helps project managers by keeping them independent from any other third party timesheet management tool.

An integrated IT project management solution needs to meet the enterprise goals, help all resources to get caught up in a project and record the actual time and effort spent the assigned tasks. Such a solution needs to have built-in features like – cost estimation, automated process aligned to the business, managing resources, allocation of tasks to resources, timesheet to capture time details of task execution, reporting, and management visibility. This can allow project managers to view all the pertinent information about the actual time spent on the Project in various ways, and ensure that a integrated approach is the best choice for better project management.

Learn more about: - software development life cycle

Advantages of Single Repository solution

Did you know that single repository solutions can offer multiple ALM solutions in a single offering which can include requirements, test, issues, risk, release and project management? The advantages of having a single repository Application lifecycle management solution are plenty especially if it is a 100% web-based solution that can provide global access without any extra requirement for external software. Such a solution can make and enable workflow processes and policy engines for routing, reviews and approvals quite easily. Also such a solution comes equipped with document attachment capabilities for global review and approval of documents and has inbuilt multiple input capturing methods such as rich Text Editor, MS Word, MS Excel, CSV file, and third party tools.

Enterprises need such single repository solutions that can offer them multiple reporting options for instance availability of such reporting options could include dashboards, Word, Excel and Crystal Reports. With all enterprises understanding the importance of working from the field, the emphasis on having a solution that has easy mobile access has become a necessity. When it comes to traceability between requirements & other entities, an optimized single repository solution can offer hierarchical traceability views, requirements traceability matrix view, and traceability network diagrams for best proactive & reactive impact analysis. Also such solutions need to offer flexible views and filter for enhanced multi-grouped hierarchy views as well as document views. As far as test management tools are concerned, such solutions can easily support manual and automated test execution with other tools such as HP Quick Test Pro. Additionally they can also allow for traceability of Test Cases with Requirements, Issues, Defects and other artifacts in an integrated scenario within the ALM Studio.

The ability to manage multiple versions of test runs for each Test Case and Test Script is yet another plus point of such an optimized solution. This ensures not just access to Test Cases anytime, anywhere but also completely automates test scheduling and running of Test Cases. Furthermore it automatically captures defects from failed test cases and allows for easy establishment of cross-tool traceability relationships with integrations. In today’s fast paced business world, enterprises need a solution that can ensure enhanced cross-tool and micro-level process automation that can enable complete standardization of best practice processes. Single repository optimized solutions has many benefits for issues management as well which includes multiple options to capture issues, multiple reporting formats-release note, trends and graphical charts. Issues can be prioritized without too much fuss and duplicate issues’ determination & linking can be made possible.

Learn more about: - change management solution

Beating the obstacles of unconnected tools with Integration Bus

Generally whenever different tools are utilized by different groups they tend to become silos of information and often end up giving some problems that include:

●        Redundant and often conflicting information in multiple tools

Manually consolidating different change requests in different tools can be quite a tedious process and can also be prone to severe errors therefore it lacks any consistency.

●        Zero process across the tools

Any enterprise even with its developed mature and automated support process including defect tracking and requirements management faces integration and synchronization problems.

●        Zero traceability and other relations between information locked in individual tools

In a development enterprise traceability may not be the sole important relation, other relationships are equally important which includes, Successor/ Predecessor, Contains/ Belongs to, Parent/ Child across different tools. And such information could be missing.

●        Manual consolidated reporting

It is typically quite a task to create a document like Release Note especially when it includes information from different tools such as new enhancements from the Requirements Tool, bug fixes from the Defect Tracking Tool and Changes from the Helpdesk?

●        Zero visibility

With all information being locked in an individual tool that can be specifically used by one particular group what generally transpires is that it tends to remain invisible to the rest of the enterprise.

This is where integration tools such as integration bus can be of assistance. Integration Bus allows for a two way total synchronization between two tools for a particular Entity and helps keep all the information current in both tools. It also enables integration between multiple tools managing the same type of items. For instance a transparent synchronization among multiple Requirements Management tools can keep the particular users of each tool aware of what is happening in the other tools. Additionally, Integration Bus synchronizes not just the data but also relations between items. This means that synchronization of data is just the starting point of any meaningful integration, with integration bus; a bigger value can be gained by synchronization of the relations among these data.

The bus also 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 tool only the approved ones need to be replicated. Furthermore it also 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. With the integration bus, an on-demand access of data ensures that there is minimization of the data replication and network traffic.

Learn more about :- software development life cycle here.

Top tips for best integrated project management

Every business understands the importance of optimized project management wherein all the problems of managing are sorted out. Optimized project management involves the best ways to apply knowledge and skills to different project activities and ably meet the expectations from a project.

Typically, project management solutions are intended to achieve business goals including automated processes aligned to the business, resource management, and allocation of tasks to resources, timesheet to capture time details of task execution, reporting, and management visibility. Such optimized project management has the ability to integrate the solution with third-party or vendor- neutral solutions by simply applying the following tips:

Total Task Management - Limited resources can be a problem but a right task management tool can make the difference. A large enterprise will need to employ a suitable tool to manage its tasks effectively, i.e. allocation of the right task to the right resource at the right time.

Timesheet Usage – Generally, project planning involves the estimated start and end times. . This is turn requires resource planning.. A timesheet makes it much easier to determine the time to be spent on resources for task accomplishment.. Formerly used to ascertain employee payroll for an enterprise, today the timesheet is utilized to ascertain the definite effort spent by resources in completing the tasks.

 The timesheet comes equipped with ways and means to offer the correct breakdown of authentic time spent on the tasks that were completed. This enabled the project manager to be fully informed of the time and effort utilized on the project. This also helps in creation of analytical reports for the management to correctly scrutinize the actual effort exhausted by the resources involved in a project.

Effective Resource Management-- Do you know that optimized allotment and planned participation of resources decide the actual accomplishment of a project? Resource planning can be quite a daunting task for any project manager he/she needs to mull over the estimated budget and period of a project. Also resources need to be accounted by the management to their actual costs. Every project has numerous requirements and these get deployed through several releases. It is the project manager’s duty to ascertain the key requirements that need to be executed in the first release. Some enterprises opt for manual distribution which may be appropriate if the project deals with a smaller list of items. However, in the case of a large number of requirements, manual distribution would be practically impossible.

Resource management requires the usage of a fitting application that can efficiently perform requirements distribution automatically, based on the distinct constraints and the rank assigned to each of the requirements. This will indeed make whole process of managing resources a whole lot easier.

Optimized Reporting and Dashboard abilities: Generally the dashboard is seen as a planned and united display of information for users to take a speedy decision on the performance of a variety of departments. Top management generally prefers viewing reports from a centralized location and therefore the dashboard is an accepted tool that can produce a range of reports and assist in making difficult decisions. It should typically make it easy to access information at one place, be able to exhibit different sets of data in manifold formats, and provide visual clarity and real time data and something not easily possible with other means of data analysis. It can assist decision- makers and top management in deciding on most feasible solutions.

These tips for optimized integrated project management can certainly provide development groups the liberty to choose their project hierarchies.. Applications like Application Lifecycle Management –ALM-can provide several benefits to any enterprise and can help implement Application lifecycle management ALM in the best possible manner. Integration bus allows for exceptional process automation of every application, thereby permitting users to execute any development methodology including a proprietary one.

Learn more about: - Change Management Process , integration tools ,   integration bus.

Understanding the Significance of Requirements Collaboration

Requirements Management plays a significant role in ultimate success of the project. A completely functional Requirements Management tool is essential for an efficient and optimal management of requirements. In a distributed project, Collaboration and Reusability are the two facets of Requirements Management which can be of considerable assistance. A group using documents for Requirements Management will be compelled to upgrade to a tool based Requirements Management.

In the recent software development practices, Collaboration has become a necessity among various groups working from different geographical locations. Collaboration is the basis for working together to share information and to accomplish common tasks, and of all phases of software development life cycle, it is the Requirement Management phase that exceedingly demands collaboration. This is especially due to the fact that various globally distributed stakeholders need to be involved in creating, reviewing and approving Requirements.

It is therefore necessary to have an application that provides a collaborative knowledge management infrastructure for distributed teams. It needs to be a web-based customizable solution, offers multiple avenues to work collaboratively to manage requirement. It also needs to provide

·         Anywhere and anytime access

A user needs to have identity authentication so that the application can be accessed over the Internet from any geographic location. Maintenance and Upgrades to the software are seamless to the end-user and are of light over-head to the IT departments.

·         Email notifications to any email addresses.

Notifications can be generated manually on an ad-hoc basis or can be automated. An email enabled mobile phone can be used for interacting with these email notifications thereby allowing users to collaborate with the rest of the team when they are physically apart.

·         Multi-threaded Discussions

As the fundamental activity of a team is make decisions on the opinions of its team members, multi-threaded discussions offer an opportunity to communicate such comments in a more ordered way, reducing the need to have costly meetings. These discussion-threads thereby permit one to capture an entire account of the decision making process.

·         Integration with Visual Studio Eclipse IDEs

The industry’s principal Integrated Development Environments (IDE) is the Visual Studio Integration Team System and Eclipse. Developers need a service integration bus to integrate and share information with Business Analysts, Architects, Project Managers and Testers, etc. Instead of starting another tool external to the IDE, the developers using these IDEs choose to collaborate within their

preferred development environment.

·         Collaboration with Process Automation

The process designer of an application needs to be capable of supporting workflow/process with sequential activities as well as concurrent activities. This establishes collaboration between a set of users working on Requirements, and another set of users working on related Design Elements.

·         Customized Workplace

A successful Requirements Management team includes stakeholders of various disciplines which help in getting inputs from various perspectives early in the project lifecycle and increases the prospect of a project’s success. By presenting the same information to the diverse users, the user is either overloaded with too much information or crippled with a lack of information. Requirements Management needs to be customizable and multiple visual interface to promote collaboration at a number of levels.

Reusing requirements

Requirements reusability permits users to use well defined, reviewed and approved Requirements from different situations. The situations could differ in terms of diverse projects, different customers, different products or even different releases of the same product.

An adequate Requirements Management tool can help a distributed project in achieving collaborative Requirements Management with extraordinary degree of reusability which can significantly diminish the development time and risks.

Learn more about: -  IT Service Management solution

Importance of Integrated ALM

Integrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) was evolved over the last ten years or so. Trying to achieve end-to-end ALM has been quite the pipe dream for various vendors. The past 2 years has seen something different emerge as there are newer technologies that are maturing in highly critical production systems and are bringing forth some long overdue benefits of Integrated Application Lifecycle Management to real development. In the current scenario, enterprises need to think about integrated ALM, and in this article we shall discuss just why integrated ALM is an essential and important enterprise tool. 

Integrated ALM allows the easy viewing of artifacts that may be managed by one tool to another tool. This includes test cases from Requirements Management Tool and Requirements from the Test case Management Tool, or even list of design objects from the IDE. This further means that even multiple artifacts are more accessible from a single tool therefore every stakeholder can access the artifacts from other tools without leaving their own tool environment. This promotes collaboration and early problem detection and also reduces errors and costs. Such an integrated ALM tool can easily create various impacting and non-impacting relationships between any two artifacts effortlessly. This facilitates the 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. Without such traceability, QA group might end up testing an obsolete requirement without even knowing that they were doing so!

Integrated ALM tools when equipped with the right product support and maintenance can ensure that processes can be automated across tool boundaries to easily implement a total ALM lifecycle with zero breaks. For instance, any change that starts its life in a Helpdesk tool as a Ticket can get automatically replicated as a Change Request in the Issues/ Change Management tool. Further it be approved by a Change Control Board then it can go to the architect to create/ modify architectural artifacts in the Designer/ Modeling tool. Next it will move to the developer for coding and to QA for creating Test cases in IDE and Test Management tools. It is an absolute necessity to have an automated workflow process.  Typically manual interfaces between tools when managed by emails and unstructured documents can sometimes result in dropping in losing out some important processes. 

Integrated ALM tools can also help enterprises manage projects and resources across tools without too much of difficulties. Development managers in enterprises often struggle with queries such as “how to ascertain “the Release date given a set of Resources?,“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 are required?‟  Integrated ALM can easily be the panacea to all such queries since it can manage all the artifacts in the mix with ease.

 

Read more about change management process  & requirements traceability