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.
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