Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture,coding, testing, tracking, and release management.^[1]

Benefits

Proponents of application lifecycle management claim that it

• Increases productivity, as the team shares best practices for development and deployment, and developers need focus only on current business requirements
• Improves quality, so the final application meets the needs and expectations of users
• Breaks boundaries through collaboration and smooth information flow
• Accelerates development through simplified integration
• Cuts maintenance time by synchronizing application and design
• Maximizes investments in skills, processes, and technologies
• Increases flexibility by reducing the time it takes to build and adapt applications that support new business initiatives

Categories of ALM Tools

A representation of the ALM concepts.

As the complexity and sophistication of the software development task has grown it has been matched by increasing numbers of tools. The initial set of tools started with version control tools at the heart of the lifecycle and have grown out from there. Though there is no industry definition of what constitutes and what does not constitute an ALM tool, and the list gets longer every day, the generally accepted categories include:

• Requirements visualization
• Requirements management
• Feature management
• Modeling
• Design
• Project Management
• Change management
• Configuration Management
• Build management
• Testing
• Release Management
• Software Deployment
• Issue management
• Monitoring and reporting
• Workflow

The Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is evolving; tool vendors are increasingly integrating their products to deliver suites. IDEs are giving way to tools that reach outside of pure coding and into the architectural, deployment, and management phases of an application?s lifecycle: Application Lifecycle Management. The hallmark of these suites is a common user interface, meta model, and process engine that also enable ALM team members to communicate using standards-based architectures and technologies such as Unified Modeling Language (UML).

ALM Tools and Vendors

References

See also

• Application Lifecycle Framework
• Systems Development Life Cycle
• Business Technology Optimization
• OSGi
• MKS Inc.

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External Links

• Borland ALM Whitepaper
• Borland Resource Center

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