Application Lifecycle Management- Before And After

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Forrester describes Application Lifecycle Management or ALM 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. “

This explains application lifecycle management but why ALM has suddenly grown so much in importance? Why there is the need of new software in application development? The answer lies in the shortcomings of the current application development environment. The following is the state of affairs in most application development companies and organizations.

Before -The Current Scenario

The lifecycle of an application comprises of different phases such as initiation, system concept development, planning, requirements analysis, design, development, integration, testing, implementation, maintenance and disposition. Hence, there is the need ...
... of different tools such as Requirement Management tool, Test Management tool, Issues Management tool, Risk Management tool, Release Management tool, and Project Management tool and more. Though companies spend millions of dollars on these tools they fail to perform satisfactorily as these are siloed tools that work in isolation.

Moreover, the current lot of integration solutions implemented by companies is not good enough to bring about successful integrations. As a result, the different stakeholders in the application development process such as the business analysts, architects, developers, testers and managers are in the dark when it comes to important aspects of application development as it comes under the purview of other stakeholders. And there is no easy way to get hold of vital information. For instance, business analysts do not know whether the customer requirements have been designed, coded or tested while the developers are not aware of the number of test cases that have failed for a particular code. As for testers, they are not sure whether any other tester is working on a bug or not.

After -The Future Scenario

Effective integration of the disparate tools helps all the project stakeholders to get real time information about the different aspects of the application development. This helps them to do the right things at the right time. Even if the members of the application development team belong to different geographic location, it would not hamper the progress of the development process. With the help of the integration tool, the project would be completed on time, on budget and in conformance with business goals.

Hence, application lifecycle management helps to ensure consistent quality and production of software applications at a faster rate by integrating the tools used at different levels of software development life cycle.

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