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
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