Application lifecycle management

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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]

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[edit] 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

[edit] Categories of ALM Tools

A representation of the ALM concepts.

As application development has evolved over time, more and more tools have been introduced. Initially, software development was supported with individual point tools, and then simple suites of tools emerged with loose integrations. Now we have modern comprehensive lifecycle tools that are fully integrated and provide capabilities for most of the roles in ALM. The most recent innovation is the discussion around ALM 2.0 which describes a vision for the application development infrastructure needed to meet the needs of the most modern development communities.[2]

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:

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).

[edit] ALM Tools and Vendors

Name Vendor
Lighthouse Artifact Software
Artisan Studio - Collaborative modelling tool suite Artisan Software Tools
Artisan Workbench - Collaborative ALM environment Artisan Software Tools
Borland Management Solutions Borland
Team Demand - Demand Management Borland
Team Focus - Project Management Borland
Team Analytics - Metrics/Reporting and Visibility Borland
Caliber Analyst - Requirements Definition and Management Borland
Silk Suite - Test Management, Functional and Performance Testing Borland
StarTeam - Change and Configuration Management Borland
Usecase Help www.Usecase.com
SCM Anywhere Dynamsoft
Integrated software process solution - Easy!Flow Easy!Software
Integrated and collaborative project management add-on - EZ!PM Easy!Software
Integrated code peer review add-on - EZ!Review Easy!Software
Powerful, easy-to-use, completely FREE issue/defect tracking system - Easy!TTS Easy!Software
Web application load/stress/performance test automation tool - Easy!LoadTest Easy!Software
CASE Spec GODA Software
HP Quality Center HP
Rational Team Concert IBM
SCM4ALL IKAN
Endeavour software factory Info Support
Kovair Global Lifecycle Kovair
Visual Studio Team System Microsoft
MKS Integrity MKS Inc.
Plastic SCM Codice Software
Polarion ALM Polarion Software Inc.
Sauce Labs - cloud-based, concurrent Selenium test execution Sauce Labs
TestTrack Pro - Defect and issue management Seapine Software
TestTrack TCM - Test case management Seapine Software
TestTrack Studio Seapine Software
Surround SCM - Source code management Seapine Software
QA Wizard Pro - Automated testing Seapine Software
Application Development Management Serena Software
ChangeMan SSM Serena Software
ChangeMan ZMF Serena Software
Dimensions CM Serena Software
Dimensions Express Serena Software
Dimensions RM Serena Software
Incident Management Solution Serena Software
Issue Management Solution Serena Software
Protype Composer Serena Software
DevSuite TechExcel
Synergy CM Telelogic (IBM)
Change Telelogic (IBM)
DOORS Telelogic (IBM)
TOMOS - SaaS solution for ALM targeted at analysts, developers, testers, project managers TOMOS Software
Codendi XEROX
DeployLX Software Protection System XHEO
Wikidsmart - semantically enables wikis (currently for Atlassian Confluence): capture of information in semantically enabled forms, enables interoperability with other applications and tools, automatically generates wiki pages zAgile
zPortal - semantic infrastructure to integrate any ALM tools. Provides "Facebook-like" collaboration dashboard zAgile
zComposer - methodology tool to define processes and instantiate projects into ALM tools zAgile

[edit] References

  1. ^ deJong, Jennifer (2008-04-15). "Mea culpa, ALM toolmakers say". SDTimes. http://www.sdtimes.com/SearchResult/31952. Retrieved on 2008-11-22. 
  2. ^ The Changing Face of Application Lifecycle Management by Carey Schwaber, Forrester Research, Inc. August 2006. [1]

[edit] See also

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