Integrated ALM for a Globally Distributed Development

There are plenty of changes taking place in application lifecycle management (ALM) with a large range of tools available to support application development. Organizations usually spend a lot on various point function tools that don’t work very well. The reason for that is these tools are in isolation and typically use traditional manual procedures to coordinate data that do not play well together. Integration is not usually present when it comes to choosing tools from different vendors to different lifecycle segments. For an optimum application development environment, an organization must connect these multiple lifecycle tools.

ALM fundamentally links business with software development like developing, testing, tracking and fixing etc. with a set of tools and applications that facilitate and integrate two groups. As all disparate tools across various functions need to be connected for the project stakeholders to share the required information, it is only when the right people are on the right projects at the right time that efficiency can be achieved. With Integrated ALM there is greater insight and better transparency for all business activities.

While most projects involve teams from different countries or companies with different cultures participate in application development, it becomes essential for an enterprise to accommodate different culture and tools, while remaining connected to ensure that there is no duplication of work and compromise of productivity. Integrated ALM helps overcome the challenge of a globally distributed environment. With efficient Application Lifecycle Management , not only is there an increase in productivity, the teams in the teams in the organization are also allowed to share the best practices for development and deployment. Developers can focus on the needs of the business while maintaining consistent quality and ensuring that the requirements and the expectations created for all end-users are met.

Integration of the application lifecycle stages brings huge opportunities for increasing the productivity of individuals and teams as it analyzes trends and implements metrics based management best practices. Although ALM reorganizes development, it also decreases the time it takes to develop the software and bring it to market. Teams can collaborate more efficiently and effectively, thereby eliminating human interface errors and time delays and helps get the most out of your investment in labor and technology.

Connecting tools has become a necessity for an organization to disseminate, implement methodologies and processes across the ALM Tools. Adopting one integrated and automatically synchronized software will certainly be advantageous. With efficient integrated ALM there will be a better synchronization between IT and the rest of the business to deliver a competitive edge in a globally distributed development.

 

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Advantages of Requirement Management Solutions

Requirement management has been an essential aspect of the software industry. Today it has been acknowledged as a crucial element of software project success as businesses depend more on software for carrying on critical mission functions.

It is a fact rework is accountable for more than 40 percent of a forward thinking company’s total expenditure – Money and time that enterprises cannot afford in this highly competitive market. Majority of this rework initiative concentrates on correcting requirements management data that would cost about 200 times more. Therefore, managing your requirements efficiently and getting them exacted right from its very inception is an imperative.

What is involved in a formal requirements management process?

The process extracts stakeholder requirements, communicates and captures requirements to every team members, organized and prioritizes requirements and manages alterations to requirements all through the project life cycle. Formal requirements definitions and management are deployed in multiple technical disciplines to a higher extent than it has been in evidence in the IT sector.

Today eminent service providers excelling in application lifecycle management(ALM) solutions has come up with efficient requirement management solutions as well. Under this project deliverables and goals are shared by varied team members, such as analysts, customers, software architects and designers to collaborate on managing needs around town or round the globe. Innovative requirement management solutions with their rich execution of requirements gathering, traceability, parsing management, intelligent reporting and base lining in a process oriented way, helps project teams to efficiently manage and map needs. Other benefits are as follows:-

* Telecommuters can work more effectively

* Improved management and control of offshore projects

* Enhanced collaboration with various internal functional groups

* Improved collaboration with service partners

 

This apart other requirement management product features includes the following:-

* Helps to prioritize and evaluate requirements for releases

* Maximized productivity

* Improved quality services

* Improved team collaboration and interaction

* Helps to manage regulatory compliance automatically

* Upgrade to the complete ALM solutions

* Helps in integrating with other tools

 

Requirements management solutions from leading service providers of ALM tools is an “anywhere-anytime” requirements gathering, analysis and management application. It is a colossal initial step towards software development. Managing the altering requirements all through the software development lifecycle is a way for setting up a successful solution that helps in fulfilling the user needs and is developed within the a suitable time and budget. This benefits every end user, stakeholders, developers, project managers and testers by ensuring that they are continuously updated on the requirement status. It also makes sure that they understand the influence of changing requirements specifically, to functionality, routines and expenses.

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Software Development Life Cycle -Tools for Transparency

Globalization led business world, depend on the technological innovations to meet the cut throat competition. Customer being the major priority in every business establishment, all the business oriented organizations and corporate houses look forward newer software applications to meet customer demands. However, every software developed indigenously by the organization’s software professionals or outsourced from experts in the field, has a life cycle of its own.

The software development life cycle or SDLC can be defined as the entire process of formal and logical steps taken to develop any software. In other words, it is a process of creating or altering software systems customized as per the models and methodologies of a particular organization. The software development life cycle involves the people, process and technology in its success drive, eases the complexities in the business and enhances the productivity status of the organization.

There are a number of methodologies and models are available to guide the software development lifecycle. Irrespective of being traditional, iterative, waterfall or Agile methodologies these solutions have a flexible workflow and configurable applications and can be customized as per organizational requirements. . Further, SDLC facilitates improvement of requirements management tools for software engineering and development and enhances its quality and efficiency.

The software development life cycle which is also referred under the new nomenclature of Application Lifecycle management, comprises of requirements management tools,  test management, risk management, release management and IT project management solutions. Other functions such as configuration management and build management which are functions of the SDLC are achieved through integration of third party tools with the help of the service integration bus adaptors.

The leading service providers in the industry list the strengths of the software development lifecycle as increased productivity with a proven framework for uniform methods, designs and operations. This also ensures timely delivery high quality software through adequate planning, control and total management while maximizing productivity. Being completely web based SDLC solutions facilitates information exchange and team collaborations over the web irrespective of time distance and geographical boundaries with the help of multiple input capturing methods, multiple reporting methods and traceability index.

The key features of the SDLC solutions include ability to trace relationships, multiple capturing methods, and multiple reporting options with automation of processes. However innovations in the technology has paved way for an integration platform or an service integration bus which would provide a platform for integrating standard SDLC tools ensuring transparency across various software development life cycle, macro and micro-level processes automation and clarity in communication across disciplines.

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OLSC Integration for Successful Collaboration

Many organizations use a number of lifecycle tools that need to share data, resources and assets. And while the existing integration methods are usually based on proprietary point-to-point APIs. With Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) there is eaiser and more effective integrations between the many tools that software and product developers use.  OSLC  offers a set of rules as to how software development tools present and share their information with other tools.  A well defined set of regulations allows vendors and customers to focus on the ability of the tools, and not so much on the how the tools will communicate and integrate with each other. 

Tools implementing OSLC can interoperate easily using a linked data approach which enables loosely united integrations with enhanced quality, navigation and traceability of shared data. OSLC  removes complexity of multiple tool integrations, and frees data to be used by ALL tools without having to replicate data. OSLC is a different approach to tool integration that seeks to integrate the resources managed by those tools into the web of data.

Successful collaboration

Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration enable tools from different domains to provide common integration scenario. A good service provider can now connect to variety of ALM tools including HP Quality Center, Microsoft TFS, SharePoint and Atlassian Jira through OSLC linking. They must have  specifications that allow conforming tools to integrate their data through simple and live linking of artifacts contained in these tools.  It must also provide an Enterprise Service Bus-based ALM integration platform to connect different ALM tools from major vendors and open source groups.

With a successful OSLC integration you can create new artifacts in RequisitePro,Quality Center , TFS integration , SharePoint and Jira Integration from RTC, RRC and RQM. Users in OSLC Consumer tools will be able to follow the latest status, updates, activities and comments, as these artifacts are getting worked on by different stakeholders. With a successful integration, you will be able to update artifacts and collaborate with other stakeholders.

Organizations using JAZZ-based Rational tools can team with a good service provider to quickly integrate with a wide range of popular ALM tools. A successful OSLC solution will enable the sharing of data through live linking between application lifecycle artifacts originating from multi-vendor ALM tools from HP, Microsoft, Atlassian to ensure effective collaboration.       

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OSLC Integration for Successful Collaboration

Many organizations use a number of lifecycle tools that need to share data, resources and assets. And while the existing integration methods are usually based on proprietary point-to-point APIs. With Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) there is eaiser and more effective integrations between the many tools that software and product developers use.  OSLC  offers a set of rules as to how software development tools present and share their information with other tools.  A well defined set of regulations allows vendors and customers to focus on the ability of the tools, and not so much on the how the tools will communicate and integrate with each other. 

Tools implementing OSLC can interoperate easily using a linked data approach which enables loosely united integrations with enhanced quality, navigation and traceability of shared data. OSLC  removes complexity of multiple tool integrations, and frees data to be used by ALL tools without having to replicate data. OSLC is a different approach to tool integration that seeks to integrate the resources managed by those tools into the web of data.

Successful collaboration

Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration enable tools from different domains to provide common integration scenario. A good service provider can now connect to variety of ALM tools including HP Quality Center, Microsoft TFS, SharePoint and Atlassian Jira through OSLC linking. They must have  specifications that allow conforming tools to integrate their data through simple and live linking of artifacts contained in these tools.  It must also provide an Enterprise Service Bus-based ALM integration platform to connect different ALM tools from major vendors and open source groups.

With a successful OSLC integration you can create new artifacts in RequisitePro, Quality Center ,  TFS integration , SharePoint and Jira Integration from RTC, RRC and RQM. Users in OSLC Consumer tools will be able to follow the latest status, updates, activities and comments, as these artifacts are getting worked on by different stakeholders. With a successful integration, you will be able to update artifacts and collaborate with other stakeholders.

Organizations using JAZZ-based Rational tools can team with a good service provider to quickly integrate with a wide range of popular ALM tools. A successful OSLC solution will enable the sharing of data through live linking between application lifecycle artifacts originating from multi-vendor ALM tools from HP, Microsoft, Atlassian to ensure effective collaboration.

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Things that OSLC Integration Can Do

Simply put, OSLC is an Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration group. In practice, people mostly use it as a generic term for every element that conforms to multiple OSLC defined standards for software development tools. Here, the general idea is to have a set of rules or standards as to how the software development tools represent and share their data with other tools and also with the world. A well defined standard enables customers and vendors to concentrate on the abilities of tools more rather than how the tools will communicate and incorporate with each other. This becomes the foundation for Collaborative Lifecycle Management that IBM prefers to emphasize with every aspect of software development sharing data. This in turn helps to automate and simplify the processes. This is how OSLC integration works.

For instance, email functionality is a component that is considered as a tool by software developers and it has an OSLC interface defined for it. There are numerous vendors who offer this email service for consumers. There is hotmail, Gmail, yahoo and many more. As each of them supports OSLC interface for email, they are considered as OSLC providers. This means each of these are considered to be a web service offering the ability for its consumers.What does OSLC integration do?

Today eminent companies dealing in Application lifecycle management solutions have introduced OSLC integration solutions. The benefits they offer are:-

● Allow users to browse the list of requirements, test cases, work items, and sets up results and defects from OSLC consumer tool such as IBM RTC

● Any of the above artifacts contained can be linked in multiple tools in the context of requirement, test case and changed item. Users are able to see a preview of the artifact along with live data arising from the source tool

● Consumers can set up new artifacts

● As these artifacts are worked on by various stakeholders, consumers of OSLC consumer tools are able to follow the updated statuses, comments and activities

● Consumers can update artifacts and collaborate with other stakeholders

Any OSLC enabled consumer tools such as RRC and IBM RTC can connect to multiple ALM tools comprising Microsoft TFS, HP Quality Center, Atlassian Jira and SharePoint through OSLC linking. Any ALM artifact in IBM RTC can possess a live link to any artifact in Microsoft TFS. Companies offering OSLC integration are presently enabling OSLC specifications for Quality Management, Change Management and Requirements Management.

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Enhance Your Project with Best Requirement Management Tools

It is a known fact, that within the systems development and distributed software project, Requirement Management often plays a crucial role in the total success of any project. In fact, for an optimal and efficient handling of requirements, a comprehensive functional Requirements Management tool is more than just a necessity. It can be rather termed as a potential life saver. As soon as an organization puts into use requirement management practice with spreadsheets and documents, it is able to convert the same into a liability than just a reliable tool.

Important Aspects of Requirement Management

There are two crucial aspects of requirements management that comprises of reusability and collaboration. Collaboration forms the nucleus for operating together to share data and to complete agendas. For the new age software development practices, collaboration amidst various roles/groups working across multiple territories has become an imperative. Amidst the various stages of software development life cycle, the requirement management stages need much higher collaboration. This is because numerous distributed stakeholders are required to be involved in reviewing, creating and sanctioning requirements.

Industry Offerings in Requirement Management

Eminent service providers in application lifecycle management today have introduced efficient requirement management tools. The best way to describe this solution is by terming it “anytime anywhere requirements” management, gathering and analysis application. The solution allows team members to share project objectives and deliverables. They can collaborate on managing requirements concerns globally. Furthermore, the solution with its rich implementation of requirements gathering, management, parsing, base lining, traceability and intelligent reporting in a process oriented methodology, enables the project teams to map and manage requirements effectively. This helps to create a feature rich product.

In addition to that, innovative requirement management tools are 100 percent web based. They are especially optimized for project work that can be disseminated between buildings on a particular campus or other sites round the globe. Other features allow the following benefits:-

* Telecommuters work more effectively

* Better management and control of offshore projects

* Better collaboration with different internal functional groups

* Better collaboration with service partners

Therefore, a standard requirements management solution generally supports email notifications to any email addresses automatically or generated manually on an ad-hoc basis. At the same time, it is helpful in seamlessly upgrading the software to the end-user. The web based software results in better TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) which is less as compared to similar client-server software with a light web interface offering a comparatively small subset of features.

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