Understanding Application Lifecycle Management
In today’ hyper competitive business environment, there is high pressure on companies and organizations to speed up delivery schedules and to develop innovative software. And they are expected to achieve this without increasing their budgets and without any compromise on quality. Though majority of the businesses consider it as a huge challenge, the fact of the matter is that reduced time to delivery can be achieved by improving the efficiency of software development. But how to improve software development efficiency?
Software development involves different stages or phases such as initiation, system concept development, planning, requirements analysis, design, development, integration, testing, implementation, maintenance and disposition. As the different phases are interdependent, it can be combined or overlapped depending upon the size and complexity of the project. Efficiency of software development can be improved by co-coordinating software development activities with Application Lifecycle Management.
Forrester defines Application Lifecycle Management as “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.”
Application Lifecycle Management is nothing but synchronization of various development activities to develop high quality software applications in a timely manner and for a reasonable cost. Application Lifecycle Management thus helps in
* delivering quality software
* improving project success rates
* reducing software development time significantly
* making software development more visible to higher business management
Today the advancements in technology have contributed in the development and use of new tools in the software development process. This includes 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 Profiler. These tools either generate or manage different objects necessary for managing the ALM process. In today’s scenario where geographically distributed teams carry out most of the software development projects, the lack of integration between the various development tools can negatively affect project success.
The evolution of Integrated Application Lifecycle Management-ALM also known as End-To-End ALM could not have come at a more appropriate time. A cost-effective, flexible and user-friendly integrated ALM can eliminate complex and costly tools integrations, and can overcome the limitations of the existing point-to-point and single-vendor tools integrations. Therefore, if an organization is not thinking about integrated ALM, it is certainly missing some compelling benefits.
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