ALM Software: Unifying the Diversity of Application Lifecycles

The economic growth is dependent on the growth of the business environment, which in turn is effected by factors such as customer’s demands, technological innovations, developments and scientific inventions leading to development of new products, service or applications. Nevertheless, irrespective of what the development churns out, all these have its own lifecycle.  Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance.

Technological developments have provided organizations with diversity of ALM tools, which makes Application lifecycle management (ALM) a complicated process.  Simplifying the diversity can make ALM implementation a less complicated one. Governance, Development and Operations are the three distinct aspects of ALM. Governance includes all of the decision-making and project management for an application and extends over its entire lifecycle. Development is the process of creating an application and happens to reappear several times in the application’s lifetime as upgrades or new versions. Operation refers to the work required to run and manage an application.  To maximize the business value of any software, all the three aspects of ALM need to be considered.

The use of right ALM tools would help in integration of requirements management, architecture, and coding, testing, tracking, and release management. However, an ideal situation is one with both horizontal and vertical integration. Though a number of vendors offer tools for integration, the ALM software offered by the industry leader streamlines software delivery and improves quality by understanding risks, costs, and schedules. This software includes tools such as

* Requirements Management tool with rich text description, ability to import files, versioning, automated graphical process, traceability, proactive and reactive impact analysis.
* Test Management tool to manage individual Test cases or a collection of them
* Issues Management tool has a visual task based workflow process engine ready to tackle issues of widely distributed team.
* Risk Management tool
* Release Management tool facilitating release planning and scheduling
* Project Management

All these tools working together in an integrated format provide unprecedented advantage for the client organization.  Further being a web-based application, this can be accessed from anywhere and the client organization can make use of the ALM solution from requirements capture to product release.  

The proponents of this solution claim that not only can the ALM software integrate with various other development tools, but also facilitates QA, Development and Project Management teams collaborate together through its Quality Center Adapters.

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Visual Reports - Key for a Well managed IT Service Organization

An organization needs to focus on all the process areas of IT Service Management to establish a reputation and this can be best achieved by using visual reports. Well-managed IT service organizations can still convey improved IT services and also accomplish the objectives of the enterprise by reducing the risks and increasing returns. The quality of the service operations, service delivery, distribution of IT assets etc., in the organizations can be assessed with the help of graphical and non-graphical reports. A proficient ITSM solution allows the creation of an extensive range of real-time reports for each ITSM process area with completely accurate data. With reports, there are a number of advantages that include, quick decision-making processes, Better organizational control on IT services, Improved problem- solving capabilities across the organization, Creation of fresh evidences for the backing of a decision, Establishing a competitive advantage, Automation of managerial procedures, to name a few.

An efficient ITSM solution needs to incorporate a SRM element that facilitates an IT service request to be consistently presented, routed, accepted, monitored, and delivered. Service request management is the process of managing a service request from submission through delivery, and it should also include pre-defined reports that enable organizations to manage progress. In the case of incident management reporting, restoring the normal service operations that follow an incident is what is required from an incident management solution. 

 Essentially, the solution needs to facilitate Incident detection and reporting, incident classification, Investigation and diagnosis, resolution and recovery, Incident closure and Incident ownership.

Problems can be recognized from a single significant incident, representing an error with an unknown cause, but with an important impact. Resolving the cause of incidents is the main aim of a Problem Management solution, and it also looks at minimizing the contrary impact of incidents and problems on the business. A well-managed IT services organization must implement proactive processes that identify and work out problems even before incidents arise. A good change management process solution too can reduce the adverse impact of necessary changes on system integrity, security, and SLAs. It should also co-ordinate and plan changes in order to offer a secure development surrounding and make the most of the productivity of the people concerned in the planning and execution of changes.

A single consistent reporting framework should have the capacity to coalesce data from all sources, including business operational systems and other forms of business knowledge to ensure a meaningful and easy- to-understand report for any aspect of Software as a Service ITSM.

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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 Requirements 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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Integration Tools: Integrating the Next generation Applications

Today’s global business scenario is the result of a technologically productive and advanced generation. Right from customers to clients to employees and the top management all being tech savvy and technology hungry, demands new and innovative software and IT infrastructure to meet the growing demands of the aggressively competitive world. With various software and applications being used, life of the workforce becomes more comfortable but for the IT professionals managing all these with a security tag is a difficult proposition.

Enterprises then opt for carrying out integration between various enterprise applications mostly among those, which have long and expensive deployment cycles, to link the data and applications from diverse information systems. Such enterprise application integration facilitates access to business-critical information in a fast way and also enables the organizations to share it broadly with employees at every level, thus leveraging IT investments. Earlier with the development of legacy systems using proprietary technology, information though available in the organizations databank, was as island groups and was not easy to upgrade.

The goal of enterprise application integration is to create a framework for integrating incompatible and distributed systems making it faster and easier to extend business processes throughout the organization. Since application integration is not an easy process, there are a number of service organizations that have forayed into the market to provide robust integration infrastructure, which would help organizations integrate large, physically distributed operational data deployments, relational data sources, packaged applications and technologies.

An integration infrastructure, which is a service-oriented architecture or SOA based integration, can reconfigure legacy systems and applications as modular, reusable services. This helps to create an environment for enterprise application integration. Further, Software Development Life Cycle tools for integration are a point-to-point integrated multi vendor tool, a single vendor integrated ALM Tools or a multi-vendor best of breed integrated ALM Tools.

Out of the three, the multi-vendor tools integration approach is free from complex and costly integrations. Based on ALM middleware technology, this method of integration of enterprise applications offers the client organization simpler development as it uses service bus architecture. Further, being web based it facilitates seamless integration tools from third party vendors, singly or multiple in a single ecosystem. Moreover, since there no hard integration codes, these middleware adapters enjoy the flexibility to integrate. The central framework of the enterprise bus allows traceability with change impact analysis.

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