Alm Tools For Productivity And Effective Team Collaboration

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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The business environment today being aggressively competitive, organizations spend large amounts every year to upgrade the infrastructure and application tools for coding, testing, tracking, requirement management, release management etc. This is a necessity for the present day scenario with globalized business, rising customer demands and the need for adhering to IT governance and compliance practices. However, these tools being implemented as and when required, are found in isolation and depend on manual procedures to synchronize the data between them.

However manual integrations being cumbersome for integrating application tools from different vendors for different life cycle phases, brings in the need for Application lifecycle management. ALM is a continuous process of managing development, maintenance, governance and compatibility stages in the life cycle of an application. In today's technology-centric environment governance and compliance are the mandated competencies. The business value of the software or application is dependent on governance, development and ...
... operation aspects of application lifecycle management. Governance covers the entire lifecycle including decision-making and project management . Development, spans through the creation of an application and its multiple upgrades and newer versions. Operation refers to running an application.

The government lays procedural frameworks for the enterprises to implement and establish effective change management practices and operational controls. This would help them maintain standards. Further, as  successful implementation of IT service management leads to increased productivity levels. To maintain productivity levels, enterprises take on ALM tools which help them eliminate ambiguity. Service providers have designed and developed a number of ALM tools, the diversity of which makes application lifecycle management a complicated process. Integrating the various tools will help simplify the diversity and  ALM implementation a much more easier.

With the help of requirements management tools and ALM tools, the enterprises can execute precise control practices, develop, document and spread change management framework for the diverse roles. In an environment where distantly located teams handle projects, the ALM tools developed must cover aspects such as test management, issue management, collaboration management, release management and other built-in functions of IT service management. Such integration will help managers gain control over projects, collaborate easily between the teams, trace project artifacts and eliminate documentation.

Leading service providers offer the enterprises various alternatives for software development life cycle integration process: a point-to-point integrated multi-vendor tools, single vendor integrated ALM tools and a multi-vendor best of breed Integrated ALM Tool. The integration of best-of-the-breed ALM tools provides a platform which facilitates simpler application development, protects the investments and allows enterprise to benefit from eclipse and TFS integration from various vendors under a single ecosystem. Such real-time integration has a great impact of the quality of services.

Read more about- traceability matrix, requirements management