Alm Integration Collaborating The Global Teams

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Customer demands and scientific inventions have led to the technological innovations which helped organizations expand to wider geographical regions. To meet the aggressive competition prevalent in the globalize environment, the organizations need to be constantly upgrading on their products, services and applications or deploying new ones. Further these applications or software which is compliant to the IT governance and practices are also bound by a life cycle.

ALM or Application Lifecycle Management is a continuous process of managing the life cycle of an application through its development, maintenance, governance and compatibility stages of SDLC. Being the distinct aspects of ALM that spans over the entire application life cycle, governance includes decision making and project management, development includes the process of application creation and its multiple upgrades.

As successful implementation IT governance and compliance practices ensures increased productivity levels in the organization, leading service providers have developed a number of ALM tools that would cover aspects of requirement management ...
... test management, issue management, change management and release management. However, the diversity of these tools make ALM a complicated process. Integrating these tools will not only simplify the process but also make it an easier process.

For a global organization ALM integration which can be both vertical and horizontal, help the project managers to collaborate with their distantly located teams, facilitate traceability between project artifacts and gain better control. The leading service providers offer their clientele three alternative approaches to the integration process; a point-to-point integration of multi-vendor tools, single vendor integrated ALM tools and best of the breed multi-vendor integrated tools. However each of the integration process is featured with simple to nil complication in case of implementation changes.

To provide greater flexibility in tool integration across the application life cycle, organizations make use of requirements management tools with focus on the development cycle such as architecture management, software project management and reporting. The development of the service integration bus for the IT environment further resolves the challenges of these global organizations.

The enterprise service bus with its vendor-neutral ALM platform allows for ALM and IT service management tool integration and with the help of adapters. Such ALM integration process based makes development of applications a simpler process, protects the investments, besides allowing the organizations to use the best of the breed ALM tools from multiple vendors all in a single ecosystem. The use of third party tools such as eclipse integration and TFS integration without any stringent business rules allows for a multi-tool change analysis and a flexible traceability matrix between the artifacts.

Read more about: OSLC integration