What is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Application lifecycle management becomes more and more crucial to project success as software becomes a major part of our lives. As offshore becomes an integral part in high-tech companies, each software development company must have a full visibility and control on the development process, in terms of quality, budget, and time to market. Furthermore, there is an increasing demand for compliance mandates by customers and the on going changes require an efficient change management.

According to Forester, Application Lifecycle Management, ALM, is “the coordination of development life-cycle activities, including requirements, modeling, development, build, and testing, through: 1) enforcement of processes that span these activities; 2) management of relationships between development artifacts used or produced by these activities; and 3) reporting on progress of the development effort as a whole”

So, there are 3 main pillars combining an ALM solution:
· Traceability of relationships between artifacts in ALM
· Automation of high-level processes in Application Lifecycle Management
· Analytics to provide visibility into the progress of development efforts in ALM

ALM 1.0 is talking about a single tool for each role; Application life-cycle management tools feature an impressive amount of redundant and usually inconsistent functionality in areas like workflow, collaboration, reporting and analytics; Repository synchronization is the primary means for integrating application lifecycle tools today - even when the tools concerned are all from the same vendor, but it is often difficult to establish, costly to maintain, or flat-out unworkable; Effort spent building and maintaining synchronizations leads to No single source of truth, and leads to overspending on ALM licensing.

ALM 2.0 talks about a single platform for the coordination and management of development activities, and not a collection of life-cycle tools with limited ALM features.
The advantages of ALM 2.0 over ALM 1.0 include:
One integrated system to manage all ALM artifacts

Product packaging - provide end users with simpler, cheaper tools, as one ALM platform provides a set of natively integrated tools.

Use of open integration standards - use of Web services APIs to ease and deepen integration between ALM tools with already existing legacy systems or single ALM tools.