Achieving IT Governance with the Right ALM tools

The productivity of an organization can be greatly increased with the successful implementation IT governance and compliance practices. Any enterprise that wants to stay in business in this present day’s global technology-centric environment needs governance and compliance as the mandated competencies. Federal laws usually govern public companies and help in establishing effective practices like reporting and operational controls such as Change management. Implementation of these procedures is regulated by a number of standards frameworks. There are a good number of procedures that have a number of standards and frameworks which help implement certain practices that include IEEE 12207 lifecycle processes, ISACA Cobit 4.1, SEI CMMI and the itSMF ITIL v 3. As most of the industry’s frameworks explain what needs to be done without elucidating as to how to go about doing it, it becomes necessary to accomplish control over the IT processes. With the right impetus given by the Sarbanes-Oxley law, enterprises can review their reporting and operational controls. Implementing improved controls and processes can provide the enterprise with the potential to enhance their productivity and value.

ALM Tools to Eliminate Ambiguity
To ensure improved productivity through the proper implementation of the Cobit 4.1 framework, enterprises need to take on application lifecycle management tools that helps get rid of the ambiguity and aids enterprises effortlessly to achieve the objectives of IT Governance and compliance. With the appropriate requirements management tools , these ALM tools can help enterprises characterize the precise tasks needed to execute each of the control practices that are essential to meet the control objectives. Such tools can also help develop, document, and spread a change management framework that identifies the policies and processes as well as the diverse roles and responsibilities. It also aids in classifying and prioritizing all changes based on business risk, authorizing and approving all changes by the business process owners and IT and also helps in tracking the status of changes.

To establish and maintain version control over all changes, an optimized ALM tool assists in the implementation of roles and responsibilities that involve business process owners and appropriate technical IT functions.  By ensuring suitable segregation of duties, these tools can assist in determine fitting record management practices and audit trails to record key steps in the change management process and can help timely closure of changes. Organized by predefined categories, these tools can help enterprises in allowing only authorized personnel to enter specific requested changes.

Implementing IT Governance and compliance is all about confirming that things are done at the right time and in the right manner. This can be achieved by selecting the right ALM tools.

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Software development life cycle

ALM Software, the Need of the Hour

Application Lifecycle management is nothing but managing the life of an application or applications through proper and continuous monitoring, development and maintenance. The lifecycle of an application comprises of different phases such as idea, design, development, testing, deployment and management. Thus, application lifecycle management involves the collaborative effort of business management and software engineering.

Forrester describes Application Lifecycle Management or rather ALM as “The coordination of development life-cycle activities, including requirements, modeling, development, build, and testing, through:

* enforcement of processes that span these activities;

* management of relationships between development artifacts used or produced by these activities; and

* reporting on progress of the development effort as a whole. “

Hence, ALM is synchronizing various development activities to produce software applications of high quality at a faster rate. Application Lifecycle Management system in no way supports or manages any single activity of a lifecycle management process. Instead it sorts of act as a connecting link between various activities. For instance, even if the business requirements are documented flawlessly, models are built impeccably, codes are written well, and numerous tests are conducted, the application can be a failure if there is lack of co-ordination between these activities. ALM ensures that all these activities are in perfect sync so that the application developed conforms to business requirements.

Advantages of Application Lifecycle Management

* Faster Development: By facilitating simplified assimilation, ALM speeds up the development process.

* Improved Quality: Applications developed through ALM conforms to the needs and requirements of the user.

* Bridging Boundaries: Smooth flow of information and teamwork makes geographical boundaries irrelevant

* Enhanced Productivity: Since all developers work on the same software, no scope of error can happen during the development and deployment stages, even if the developers are geographically distributed.

* Reduced Maintenance Time: Synchronization is the foremost aspect of Application Lifecycle Management. Hence, through effective co-ordination of application and design it can lower maintenance time considerably.

* Enhanced Flexibility: The time required for the applications to adjust and adapt to new business requirements is very low.

Though Application Lifecycle Management system is considered to increase the whole life cost of an application, it is negotiable when compared to its immense advantages.

ALM software uses various kinds of interconnected tools such as Requirement Management tool, Test Management tool, Issues Management tool, Risk Management tool, Release Management tool, and Project Management tool.

Hence, enterprises in search of an application that not only conforms to business requirements but also to internal external requirements should invest in ALM software.

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Software development life cycle

TFS Integration- Integrating The External And Internal Systems

The technological innovation and the global business environment today, has made the entire globe a workplace. Anyone can log in from anywhere in the world to their corporate offices or branch office desktops and be working any time of the day. Hence, when it comes to software developers they are no exception.  Software developers scattered around the globe are working on different parts of a project simultaneously. The application lifecycle management has facilitated managing large projects with hundreds of contributors with ease and dexterity.

Software tools are now available which enables budget and cost resources tracking, manages plans and other activities before a project approval, and manages operations activities after completion of the Project. For simpler tasks, the Project Task List available under the Sharepoint technology comes as a rescue and facilitates collaboration with the web through the Project Web Access and Workspaces. To integrate the efforts of the workforce across global locations hosted Team Foundation Server acts as a centralized control tool.

The team Foundation Server is an industry wide standard for collaborating
with Visual Studio integration projects. Once subscribed, the professionals in the field provide a customized solution for the software needs of the organization. With a source code repository, to support conflict resolution, Permissions, Integration, Versioning and Reporting this software facilitates faster and easier completion of reports with current status of your project, including bugs, rate of change of the code and milestones.

TFS, or Team Foundation Server Integration is a platform, which eases integration between external systems and TFS. This facilitates tools involving the unidirectional, movement of data to TFS as well as a to and fro integration of data. With the creation of integration adapters with the capabilities of Omnibus Integration bus middleware, and Omnibus APIs, the bi-directional integration with TFS becomes easy. Further, the data entered in the Omnibus can be used to achieve visibility for management analytics and change management.

Available either as stand-alone software, or as the server back end platform, it works in a three-tier architecture: the client tier, the application tier and the data tier. The client tier is used for creating and managing projects and accessing the items that are stored and managed for a project. The application layer also includes a web portal and a document repository, which are used by applications like Visual Studio Team integration. The data tier provides the persistent data storage services for the document repository.

TFS integration provides the software developers with end-to-end traceability of the source code, allows tracking of code units for defects and change requests, allows access to version of code units from other tools, ensuring cross tool visibility, lifecycle transparency, process automation, efficient workflow and increased team collaboration.

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Quality center integration

Jira integration

Understanding the Functionalities and Benefits of an Integrated ALM

Technologies are bringing in manifold advantages of Integrated ALM to real development as they are maturing in vital production systems. Application development enterprises invest a lot of money on different siloed point function tools that includes requirement management, architecture, coding, build, testing, tracking, release management and more. Being the most sought-after aspects of software development process, integrated ALM tools has a number of compelling benefits. And, if an organization is not thinking about an integrated ALM, it is certainly missing out on these benefits.

A cost-effective, flexible and user-friendly integrated ALM eliminates complex and costly Integration tools, and surmounts the limitations of the existing point-to-point and single-vendor tools integrations. An integrated ALM has immense significance, and its functionalities and benefits include:

1. Improved insight

There are often problems of visibility in the enterprise as far as day-to-day activities in application development are concerned. With an integrated and connected ecosystem of tools, every individual, team and organization gains greater insight into the application development and aids them to do their job much better in an informed way. This way there is a certainty of total visibility into projects, people, costs and items.

2. Executing best practices

Devoid of interconnected set of tools including requirements management tool, it is almost impossible to integrate different engineering processes carried out in different practitioner tools. While paper based processes are used to control handoffs between functional areas, with integrated engineering process the hand offs can be done automatically. This is due to its inherent method of communication, synchronization and feedback between stage level processes which is indispensable for a successful application development.

3. The finest global distributed development

With application lifecycle development becoming more global, projects are involving the working of a huge number of teams from different locations. Enterprises are often faced with situations where for the same lifecycle domain there are people working in different countries. Although participating in application development, there is a need to accommodate and adjust to different culture and tools. With an integrated ALM it is possible to remain connected in such a way that ensures no duplication of work, no decrease in productivity, and all cross-culture miscommunication is minimized.

Integration business rules change over time for reasons such as the ever evolving business conditions, group dynamics, and development methodologies. With an ability to integrate multiple tools on the bus for the entire development & IT Lifecycle, an efficient application lifecycle management solution supports a comprehensive and user-friendly Web interface.

Services Provided By Application Lifecycle Management Solutions

Application Lifecycle Management refers to capacity to co-ordinate, manage and integrate multiple stages in a software delivery process. From the development stage to that of implementation, ALM forms a suite of well-defined tools and methods that consists of designing, definition, testing, development, implementation and management. In the entire ALM process, the each stage is closely controlled and supervised.  

Application Lifecycle Management, comes with a following set of ALM tools. They are as follows:-

1. Point-to-point Integrated Multi-Vendor Tools

2. Single Vendor Integrated ALM Tools

3. Multi-vendor Best of Breed Integrated ALM Tools

Eminent service providers offer ALM studio that offers efficient ALM solution that covers from requirement capture to the product release. The various group members, for instance analysts, customers, designers and software architects, share the assignments goals and deliverables. This is collaborated around the globe. Let us have a look at the features of ALM :-

1. It is 100 percent Web based – Users are able to access a web architected grounds-up framework via eminent browses such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and others.

2. There are Multiple input methods with which the users can capture any requirements through the following ways – Sending them by Email, Import them from Microsoft Word Document, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or a CSV file with a configurable format, Submitting inputs from a corporate portal or website or from any third party tools in real-time.

3. Entity Relations –  Traceability is a common feature in a Requirement Management tool, ALM solution has expanded the concept of the Traceability Relations and has made it a core feature for its built-in applications.

4. It Process Mechanization – ALM solutions with the help of its in-built workflow engine helps in complete IT process automation of the in-built application.

In addition to all these features, ALM solution can also create documents and reports of different kinds by using multiple reporting options such as :-

1. HTML, enabling direct printing from the application

2. Export any lists to Excel for additional formatting and manipulation

3. Built-in Crystal Reports offer easy ways to perform custom formatting

4. Word Reporting enables fully customizable formatting with multi-level data elements

5. Dashboard Report with updates data from the system for reporting any aspect of the project that includes the overall Project Health or Process Indices Report with Graphical, Tabular and Chart formats.

Hence, with the new age ALM solutions  users are able to efficiently integrate the software delivery process as per their needs.  

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Requirements management

Software development life cycle