Thursday, May 24, 2012

Fulfilling Results with the Integrated ALM Tools

The globalized business environment is the result of technological innovations which have arisen from factors such as customer demands and scientific inventions. However to meet the aggressive competitiveness prevalent in such an environment, organizations still struggle to develop new products, services and applications that adhere to IT governance and compliance practices. Irrespective of the type product or application, these are further bound by its respective lifecycle period.
Application Lifecycle management or ALM is a continuous process which involves managing the lifecycle of an application through its development, maintenance, governance and compatibility stages. These three, governance, development and operation are the distinct aspects of ALM. Governance extends over the entire application lifecycle and includes all of the decision-making and project management aspects.  Development, which spans through an application’s lifecycle, includes the process of creating an application and its multiple upgrades and newer versions. Operation refers to the work required to run an application. The business value of the software or application is thus dependent on all these aspects.

Further, the successful implementation of IT governance and compliance practices paves for an increased productivity levels in the organization.

Technological innovations have paved way for the development of a number of ALM tools However, the diversity of these tools makes application lifecycle management a complicated process. Since ALM refers to the management of all phases of an applications lifecycle, through one tool, integrating the various tools will not only simplify the diversity and will also make ALM implementation a much easier process.

In an environment where most of the projects are handled by teams which are distantly located, 
ALM tools thus developed must be one that would cover aspects like requirement management, test management, issue management, change management, release management,  collaboration management etc . An integrated tool will help project managers gain better control over their projects, provide better collaborations between the distantly located team members and facilitate traceability between project artifacts while eliminating unnecessary documentation. Ideally integration should be both horizontally and vertically.

Leading service providers however offer client organization with software development life cycle tool integration process with three alternative approaches; a point-to-point integrated multi vendor tools, single vendor integrated ALM tools and a multi-vendor best of breed Integrated ALM Tools. The point-to-point integration though simple has complications when implementing changes. The Single vendor tools integration also has limitations, whereas the multi-vendor tools integration process is free from any limitations.

The  integration approach based on  ALM platform technology makes application development significantly simpler, protects investments, allows organizations to use best of the breed tools by integration multiple third party ALM tools such as eclipse integration, TFS integration etc from various vendors in a single ecosystem. Further, without any hard-coded integration business rules, these are configurable at the mouse controls and has a multi-tool proactive change analysis with a flexible traceability matrix between various artifacts.

Other Links

Friday, May 18, 2012

Advanced ALM Solutions Offerings

Defining Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is not very easy. Different people and organizations have their own take and perspectives on the same. Still, ALM is a crucial topic in today’s corporate world. Sometimes people confuse ALM with Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). ALM is way different from SDLC. An application’s lifecycle comprises of the total time through which an enterprise is incurring expenditure in this asset i.e. from the beginning idea stage to the final phase of the product’s life. To be both accurate and useful, ALM today needs to have an equally wide perspective.

Features of Advanced Application Lifecycle Management Solutions
Today there are leading market players providing a well-equipped ALM studio specializing in Application Lifecycle Management solutions. They cater multiple aspects ranging from requirements management to the final product release stage. Furthermore, there are other members, for instance customers, analysts, software architects, designers that share deliverables and assignment goals amongst them. This is then collaborated worldwide. Other features are:-

100 percent web based solutions - Users are able to access a web architected grounds-up framework through popular browsers such as, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and many others
* There are Multiple input procedures that helps users to have any requirements through the following methods – 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

Entity Relations – The common feature in a Requirements Management tool is traceability and advanced ALM solution have expanded this Traceability Relations making it a central feature for its built-in applications

IT Process Automation – ALM solutions assists in total IT process automation of the in-built application However, the three essential aspects of Application Lifecycle Management comprise governance, development and operations. Furthermore, the modern day ALM tools include the following:-

* Multi-vendor Best of Breed Integrated ALM Tools
* Point-to-point Integrated Multi Vendor Tools
* Single Vendor Integrated ALMTools

ALM solutions are also capable of creating multiple kinds of reports and using multiple reporting tools such as:-

* HTML, allowing direct printing from the application
* Export any lists to Excel for additional formatting and manipulation
* In-built Crystal Reports that provide simple means to perform custom formatting
* Word Reporting leads to fully personalized formatting with multi-level data elements
* Dashboard Report with updates information from the system for reporting any aspect of the project that comprises the overall Project Health or Process Indices Report with Graphical,
* Tabular and Chart formats
Thus we see that innovative ALM solutions help the users to fit in the software delivery process as per their needs.



Other Links

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Gain Greater Insight into Application Development with ALM

The lifecycle of any application comprises of different phases such as idea, design, development, testing, deployment and management. Usually, application development organizations spend a fortune in buying expensive function tools to manage requirement management, architecture, coding, build, testing, tracking, release management and more. In addition, these organizations spend a great amount of their time in training their employees in using these tools. However, even after that, they fail to get full value out of these investments. This is because even though the organizations are equipped with best of breed tools for different phases of the application lifecycle and well-trained employees there is no effective collaboration and synchronization between the different tools to ensure consistent quality.


In a typical application development environment, the different stakeholders such as business analysts, architects, developers, testers and managers have no idea regarding the overall application development activities and status. They work in isolation using siloed point function tools that include Requirements Management tool, Test Management tool, Issues Management tool, Risk Management tool, Release Management tool, Project Management tool, Document Management tool, Test Automation tool, and Debugger/Profiler. Since all are working towards developing a high quality software application, lack of collaboration and integration between the various stakeholders hurt the quality of the software application developed badly. Last minute surprises prove costly and affect the overall software application development process causing irreparable damage. Such a situation can be overcome using Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution.


Application Lifecycle Management or rather ALM according to Forrester is “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. “


ALM helps application development companies to produce software applications of high quality at a faster rate. ALM manages the life of an application or applications throughproper and continuous monitoring, development and maintenance. It does not manageany single activity of a lifecycle management process; instead, it synchronizes various development activities to develop high quality software applications in a timely manner and for a reasonable cost.


Thus, ALM integration helps the various stakeholders gain greater visibility into the progress and quality of development projects by providing them up-to-date real-time information also integrates disparate tools together.  


Irrespective of whether the project is developed in the office next door, or by a facility 10,000 miles and 10 time zones away, ALM helps organizations to develop applications that match not only with business requirements but also with all internal and external requirements.


Hence, instead of investing in siloed tools, companies must invest in ALM software to fast track their business success.



Other Links