Derive maximum benefits of Integrated ALM

Integrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) was evolved over the last decade. Being able to attain continuous ALM has been a dream for most vendors. The past two years however has witnessed something different with the advent of new technologies that are evolving crucial production systems and generating long overdue advantages of Integrated ALM to real development. Integrated ALM today has become an essential enterprise tool today.

Application development organizations undertake expenditures up to millions of dollars per year on various siloed point function tools encompassing requirements management, coding, architecture, build, tracking, testing, release management and many more. These tools reside in isolation and depend mostly on conventional broken manual processes to synchronize data of one tool with the other. Hence, they do not perform well together.

You might come across few point-to-point fragile hardwired integration between tools if an enterprise commits to a single provider for every tool. Integration is hardly available for an enterprise to select the best of breed tools from various vendors of for multiple lifecycle phases. Recently, eminent companies specializing in ALM tools have come with innovative integrated ALM solutions that offer great benefits. These benefits are the compelling reason as to why an organization needs to incorporate multiple lifecycle tools for an optimum single repository application development platform. The benefits are:-

* Attain useful insights into projects

* Being able to implement best practice methods

* Enables in overcoming challenges for a globally distributed development

* Helps in fostering collaboration between stakeholders

* Maximizes productivity and leads to quicker delivery

* Improve customer satisfaction

* Enhance quality

* Helps in managing any kind of change with confidence

* Enables in collecting actionable metrics and intelligence

* The total team carries on work in its own tool department

It must be noted that Integrated ALM when equipped with the apt product assistance and maintenance can guarantee automated procedures all through tool boundaries to easily execute a total ALM lifecycle with no breaks. For example, any alteration that gets initiated at the Helpdesk tool can as a ticket has the chance of getting replicated automatically as a Change Request in the Issues/Change Management Tool. It is further approved by a Change Control Board and that makes it reach to the architect for modifying or setting up architectural artifacts in the Modelling/Designing tool. Post this it would move to the developer for coding and then to the QA for setting up Test cases in IDE and Test Management Tools. It is therefore necessary to have an automated workflow process.

Generally, manual interfaced between tools when managed by emails and unformatted documents can result in dropping in losing out some important processes. ALM Integration tools also assists organizations in managing resources and projects with ease and simplicity.

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Traceability matrix

Software development life cycle

ALM Tools Connecting the Global Teams

The techno savvy global business environment demands every organization to  mandatory implementation of IT  governance and compliance practices. The globalized business world has also paved way for the software development teams to be working from distant locations, multinational and multicultural environment. However, to stay ahead in the competition requires that these organizations also make use of  best of the breed  tools that would  support the software development life cycle  process.

Further,  every stage in the software development life cycle require function tools for requirement management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking and release management.  Collecting the best-of-the-breed ALM tools from different vendors may not help in the smooth completion of the application. It thus becomes necessary that the  tools used in the process may be available to the developers as a integrated one. An integrated IT Service management platform will accommodate different ALM tools. 

Such integration of ALM tool will help organizations overcome the structural challenges of working with teams that are distantly located and will also ensure timely project completion and in tune with the business objectives. Further, these connecting tools will help organizations to disseminate, implement and automate certain methodologies and best practice processes cross teams. Strict adherence to the methodology will help in achieving consistency through the software development cycle and also reduce defects from communication lapses.

The IT service management platform  ensures  that all changes are tracked and managed so as  to facilitate any additions, modifications or eliminations. However, with a wide range of tools available in the market to support ALM, improved productivity can be ensured through proper implementation. The various options of integrated ALM  tools to choose from include a point-to-point integration, single vendor integration and multi-vendor best of the breed integration tools.

The need integrated ALM tools for software development provides various options to choose from. Starting from point-to-point integration, single vendor integration up to multi-vendor best of breed integration tools. Nevertheless, enterprises need to take on application lifecycle management tools that would help to ward off ambiguity and facilitate effortless achievement of  objectives of IT Governance and compliance.

The use of appropriate requirements management tools along with the ALM tools will  help enterprises to  develop, document, and spread a change management framework required to identify the policies and processes.  An optimized ALM tool assists in the implementation of roles and responsibilities of business process owners and establishes version control over all changes. Selecting the right ALM tools will help organizations to implement  IT Governance and compliance at the right time and in the right manner.

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Service integration bus

Perforce Integration

Integrating Tools for an Efficient Software Development Life Cycle

Organizations in their attempt towards meeting the challenges of the competitive business environment look towards technology and its advances to be benefitted by it. Technological innovations help the globally bound business organizations to be networked and be communicative in all respects, be update with software applications for faster and better business transactions.

However, the software development aspects are taken care of by the experts in the IT industry. Technically, software development is a complex process and goes through various stages of development procedure which is termed as software development lifecycle (SDLC). The basic stages of software development can be detailed as understanding the requirements which includes need for software, client expectations and technical feasibility. After analyzing the requirements and technical feasibility, comes the initiation which starts with the design phase, made up of system design and component design. While the system design caters to the design of the software as a whole, the component design plans for the individual components. This is followed by the implementation, testing, documentation, project deployment and maintenance phases.

However, today with technological innovations gaining a center stage, a number of enterprises from the IT sector have forayed into the business of providing SDLC solutions. These solutions helps organizations to ease out the complexities of business and IT and also help in achieving the organizational goals and objectives. The stages of the software development cycle follow a definite development methodology as per the organizational requirements or the requirements of the project. Customization of the software development lifecycle requires the service providers to evaluate each requirement before formulating the development strategy. SDLC follows either the traditional waterfall development methodology or the iterative one or an agile methodology. The software development lifecycle facilitates improving the requirements management for software development, and the quality and efficiency of the products delivered.

With the primary objective to enhance the quality and efficiency of the software delivered, SDLC solutions provides adequate control and reporting formats. The software development lifecycle solutions offered by the leaders in the industry include a number of tools which need to be integrated. The first one being the requirements management software tools, followed by test management, issue management, risk management, release management and IT project management. Other functions such as configuration management can be achieved through integration of third party tools with the help of the integration bus adapters.

Though there are in-built tools that facilitate integration from external locations, the ecosystem requires point-to-point integrated multi-vendor tools. The word-class multivendor tools include eclipse integration, subversion integration, quality center integration and TFS integration tools. Software development life cycle thus gains it strength from uniformity in design, methods and operations.

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Perforce Integration

Sharepoint integration

Requirements Management Process with Integrated Tools

The application lifecycle management process is extremely crucial in software development. The ALM tools that you use must facilitate extensive integration so that all the requirements are fulfilled adequately and the final result is impressive. ALM integration can provide you with valuable insights regarding the progress of the software development project. It helps in deploying best practices and eliminates challenges faced by distributed development teams. The process leverages collaboration and efficiencies thereby accelerating performance deliveries and improving quality. All changes are easily managed and a cohesive platform is provided for a combined team effort.

In order to develop optimum software you have to be sure about the requirements so that you can develop and deploy strategies as per the criteria that is based on the requirements analysis. It is very important to understand that requirements can also change at any given point of time. So your tools and processes must be extremely flexible so that these changes can be easily adopted and incorporated to fit the current scenario without creating any conflicts or rendering any damaging effects on the entire operation.

The strategic ALM integration tools help in the deployment of an optimized and highly collaborative requirements management process that saves you from unexpected costs and facilitates the developers to work as a united force. The requirements management software process provides you the advantage of collecting, managing and analyzing requirements. It provides you with comprehensive traceability capabilities for creating logical links between the requirements, and also enhances the visibility of the process. A real-time analysis of the effects caused due to changes in requirements will help you to apply corrective measures without any delays and saves you from unnecessary costs.

An automated and proficient process will help in the reuse of the requirements assets resulting in quality improvement and reduction of time. If your requirements management process is well-defined then there is no need to panic in case any changes take place. The changes can be seamlessly integrated without affecting the performances or costs. The process also helps in comparing the ratings for each requirement from multiple users against the objectives of the business. This helps you in assessing the value of each requirement which can be utilized for more effective decisions in the development process.

The process provides consistent marketing requirements documents, system requirements specifications, product roadmaps, test compliance reports, requirements stability charts, graphical charts with distribution of requirements as per different categories such as type, source, criticality etc. It also provides you with testing and verification facilities to create, run and manage test cases. The use of intelligent tools in the software development process will contribute immensely to your success.

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IT service management tools

Visual studio integration

Significant Achievements with The Integrated ALM Platform

The process of software development can only be successful if you have a flexible, collaborative and integrated application lifecycle management platform. You will have to constantly make changes in the process to develop an optimum product and also trace the entire cycle to the original specifications. However these changes must not affect your costs. You must also ensure that all the developers are on the same page irrespective of their geographical locations so that unexpected and costly expenses can be avoided due to any conflicting executions, and a fulfilling requirements management process is carried out.

An integrated ALM solution provides a single repository for a streamlined and centralized management process that provides highly efficient performances. It ensures the deployment of a smooth and effective workflow that facilitates reviews and escalations. The solution provides excellent capabilities for attaching documents for the purpose of global reviewing and document approvals. It provides you with dashboards for real-time reports and provides you opportunities for making critical and insightful decisions.

Integrated ALM tools helps in the deployment of best practices, improves the quality of the processes, enhances productivity and ensures faster time-to-market which increases the customer satisfaction levels. All changes can be easily incorporated without causing any disruptions in the operations and without affecting the costs. The ALM tools facilitate Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration or OSLC integration that provides assistance in integrating data through simple and live linking of artifacts.

You can browse the Requirements in RequisitePro, test cases in the Quality Center, work items in TFS, build results in Hudson and detect defects in Jira from the OSLC tool. You can also link all the artifacts present within different tools as a requirement in RRC, change the items in RTC and test cases in RQM. The tool provides you a preview of the artifacts with live data sourced from the main tool. You can create new artifacts, check the latest status and updates. You can update the artifacts and easily collaborate with the stakeholders.

The integrated ALM platform also provides sharepoint integration services for the tracking and processing of the various artifacts stored and shared in sharepoint, thereby encouraging collaboration and increasing the visibility of artifacts maintained in sharepoint by others. The integrated ALM solution provides you with commendable support that fulfills the requirements in the software development process with proficiency and diligence. It creates opportunities that enhance your revenue earning potentials, and helps you deliver with brilliance.

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Enterprise service bus

Software as a Service SaaS

Developments in IT Service Desk Management

Over the past few years, service desks were only assigned to respond and record to user issues that took place in the environment. Today service desk analysts have become more proficient in handling this task. At the same time, the role and scope of the IT service desk has expanded in order to assist a wide range of IT management practices and IT companies need to match their solution to these evolved needs. The modern day service desk operates at the front office of IT and orchestrator of many IT service management activities that are included in ITIL best practices library. The process sections of problem and incident management, configuration management, change management, release management and others need to orchestrated and connected to benefit the service consumer.

The IT Service Desk is changing

Today the responsibilities of the ITSM tools are changing as well as expanding. The primary responsibility is to improve the consumer satisfaction. This is done by functioning as the single contact point for all the IT customers to maximize the service accessibility, restore services whenever possible and offers business systems assistance. The increased pressure on IT for reducing expenses has placed the service desk front and center as an enterprise that can set up processes that many other enterprises, in and out of IT can utilize. The service desk team therefore becomes the owner and custodian of IT services offered to the line of business.

Today eminent service providers of ALM integration have come up with innovative IT service management tools that cater to the changing IT service desk scenario. Some of the selected features include:-

* Numerous service requests can be associated to an incident and in such a case, the closure of these requests depends strictly on the closure of linked incidents.

* The IT help desk software enables various helpdesk procedures and enables the deployment of various workflows even within a single helpdesk interface

* There is a multi-user conditional resolution capacity that helps numerous helpdesk people to play various roles for various conditions

* Innovative IT help desk software solutions effortlessly integrates the helpdesk and all other constituents of IT service management tools for instance problem management, change management, release management and incident management.

Numerous itsm service desks today have realized the gap that lies between their present state and an optimal state concerning expenses, user feedback, staffing, scalability and opportunity. Every organization must assess their service desk state to assess how well they have been leveraging the process, people and the technologies available today. Numerous service desk vendors have most of the functionalities today. Hence, it is essential too assess the IT service management offerings from a service provider prior to joining hands with it.

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Subversion integration

Requirements traceability matrix
 

Reaping in the benefits of OSLC integration

OSLC also known as Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration has been the latest buzzword in the software development landscape. However, chances are there that even if you have not heard of it, you might be operating any software that depends on it. To explain in simple terms, OSLC is both a community of software developers as well as an organization that works towards standardizing the manner in which that software lifecycle tools can share the data and set up specifications explaining the way the data is actually shared. Perhaps the most prominent use of OSLC integration till date has been the IBM Rational Jazz Platform and the allied set of products. These Jazz products use OSLC specifications for incorporating with each other to provide complete Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions. 

Owing to the fact that OSLC specifications are accessible under the Creative Commons Attribution License, it is not just Jazz based products that have been using OSLC to solve integration concerns. Generally, enterprises make use of a multiple tools from various vendors and open source providers to support and manage individual phases of application development lifecycle or SDLC.

Benefits of OSLC integration

Top notch companies specializing in ALM integration tools have come up with the latest OSLC integration solution.  

They offer the following benefits:-

* Enables the users to browse from the requirement list, work items, test cases,  set up results and detects from the OSLC consumer tool, for instance IBM RTC

* Artifacts contained are linked to various tools in the context of test case, requirement and changed item. The users are able to get a preview of the artifact with live data the generates from the source tool

* Consumers are able to create new artifacts

* As the artifacts are being worked upon by multiple shareholders, users of OSLC consumer tools can follow the status updates, comments and other activities

* Consumers can update artifacts and collaborate with other stakeholders

Today any OSLC enabled end user tools, for instance IBM RTC and RRC have the capacity to connect various ALM tools including Microsoft TFS, HP Quality Center, Atlassian Jira and SharePoint with the help of OSLC linking. Any ALM artifact in IBM RTC can have a live link to any artifact in Microsoft TFS. Enterprises providing OSLC integration are today enabling OSLC specification for change management, quality management and even requirements management software.

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Perforce Integration

Subversion integration