Fulfilling Results With The Integrated Alm Tools

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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The globalized business environment is the result of technological innovations which have arisen from factors such as customer demands and scientific inventions. However to meet the aggressive competitiveness prevalent in such an environment, organizations still struggle to develop new products, services and applications that adhere to IT governance and compliance practices. Irrespective of the type product or application, these are further bound by its respective lifecycle period.

Application Lifecycle management or ALM is a continuous process which involves managing the lifecycle of an application through its development, maintenance, governance and compatibility stages. These three, governance, development and operation are the distinct aspects of ALM. Governance extends over the entire application lifecycle and includes all of the decision-making and project management aspects. Development, which spans through an application’s lifecycle, includes the process of creating an application and its multiple upgrades and newer versions. Operation refers to the work required ...
... to run an application. The business value of the software or application is thus dependent on all these aspects.
Further, the successful implementation of IT governance and compliance practices paves for an increased productivity levels in the organization.

Technological innovations have paved way for the development of a number of ALM tools. However, the diversity of these tools makes application lifecycle management a complicated process. Since ALM refers to the management of all phases of an applications lifecycle, through one tool, integrating the various tools will not only simplify the diversity and will also make ALM implementation a much easier process.
In an environment where most of the projects are handled by teams which are distantly located, ALM tools thus developed must be one that would cover aspects like requirement management, test management, issue management, change management, release management, collaboration management etc . An integrated tool will help project managers gain better control over their projects, provide better collaborations between the distantly located team members and facilitate traceability between project artifacts while eliminating unnecessary documentation. Ideally integration should be both horizontally and vertically.

Leading service providers however offer client organization with software development life cycle tool integration process with three alternative approaches; a point-to-point integrated multi vendor tools, single vendor integrated ALM tools and a multi-vendor best of breed Integrated ALM Tools. The point-to-point integration though simple has complications when implementing changes. The Single vendor tools integration also has limitations, whereas the multi-vendor tools integration process is free from any limitations.

The integration approach based on ALM platform technology makes application development significantly simpler, protects investments, allows organizations to use best of the breed tools by integration multiple third party ALM tools such as eclipse integration, TFS integration etc from various vendors in a single ecosystem. Further, without any hard-coded integration business rules, these are configurable at the mouse controls and has a multi-tool proactive change analysis with a flexible traceability matrix between various artifacts.