Understanding ALM

Today, different kinds of software are available where companies have to manage speed and productivity for the lifecycle of application. So they need to accomplish this using long term plans. The company can achieve this consistency using Application Lifecycle Management.

What is Application Lifecycle Management ?
ALM refers to complete life cycle of a software product or application. It is like a superset of Software Development Life Cycle as SDLC mainly focuses on development while it focuses mostly on all the stages starting from design to development and from testing to deployment and from delivery to maintenance of software application by using some tools and techniques.

It organizes involved people and integrated tools involved in Application lifecycle to enhance product quality and increase productivity.

Different Stages in ALM :
Since different processes are integrated using ALM, we can check progress, how much time being taken, which test is completed. So the different stages of ALM are :

1. Defining requirements : Refers to documenting, prioritizing, agreeing on requirements.
2. Design management : Refers to give an architecture to the requirements to clear and improve customer’s satisfaction.
3. Build management : Refers to actual building and testing of application. Here idea converts into actual application.
4. Software Configuration Management : Refers to control the change in code or application during development.
5. Operation and Maintenance : Refers to plan updates and monitor and manage deployment and maintenance.
6. Testing Phase : Refers to verify whether application is fulfilling all requirements declared initially.
7. Delivery and Feedback : Refers to collect user experience and feedback after delivery of application.

How Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is different from Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) ?
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) are mistakenly taken as same. But both are different as SDLC refers to development phase while ALM refers to entire lifecycle of application from maintenance and retirement and eventually continuous after development of application.

While ALM includes different lifecycles for given applications Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) can be considered as a part of this lifecycle management, testing and deployment stages.

Some important ALM Tools are Kovair ALM Studio, Microfocus ALM and VersionOne etc.

Benefits of ALM :

1. ALM gives good visibility to project status.
2. Communications and interactions between teams are effective.
3. It is easy to track and organize, so helpful in gaining control on system.
4. ALM helps to deliver software with minimum tax on team.
5. Allows room for real time decision making.
6. Cost of operating and maintaining the product is minimal.
7. It promotes team to produce product with speed and agility to stay competitive.
8. ALM contains integrated system to collect feedback and pass it down to the teams in order to improve the product.

Consequence faced without ALM :

• Team communication becomes ineffective.
• Meet business demand with project risk.
• Unpredictable delivery and quality of the product.
• Lack of visibility into project status.