Features & Benefits Application Lifecycle Management

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a little complicated to define, as various enterprises and individuals have their own viewpoints about it. However, it still is a an important topic in today in the corporate landscape. There have been times when people have confused ALM with Software Development Life cycle i.e. SDLC. Both these concepts are separate and have their own distinguishing factors.

An application’s entire life cycle involves the entire time through which an organization is incurring expenses in this asset, that means from the inception stage to the end part of the product’s life. In order to be meaningful and precise, Application Lifecycle Management today requires to have a broad and all encompassing perspective.

Application Management Solutions

Today eminent solution providers along with their ALM studio provides innovative ALM solutions. They fulfill various aspects that range from requirements management to release management in the final stage. Other ...
... members for instance, analysts, customers, software architects and designers share their project objectives and deliverable amidst them which later is collaborated globally. Other aspects of the solution include the following:

* Solutions are 100 percent web based – End users can access a web architect grounds-up framework with the help popular browsers such as, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and many others
* Presence of various input processes that enables end users to have any need through the following ways – Sending them by Email, Import them from Microsoft Word Document, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or a CSV file with a configurable format, Submitting inputs from a corporate portal or website or from any third party tools in real-time
* Entity Relations – The common feature in a Requirements Management tool is traceability and advanced ALM solution have expanded this Traceability Relation making it a central feature for its built-in applications
* IT Process Automation – ALM solutions assists in the total IT process automation of the inbuilt application

Basics of ALM Tools

There are three essential aspects of application lifecycle management, namely governance, development and operations. Innovative ALM tools include the following:-

* Multi-vendor Best of Breed Integrated ALM Tools
* Point-to-point Integrated Multi Vendor Tools
* Single Vendor Integrated ALM tools

This apart, a standard ALM suite from a leading market players has the capacity of setting up various kinds of reports and using other reporting tools for instance:

* HTML that helps in direct printing from the application
* Export any lists to Excel for additional formatting and manipulation
* Inbuilt Crystal Reports offering easy ways to conduct custom formatting
* Word Reporting that results in a completely personalized formatting with multi-level data components

Hence, the present day innovative application management lifecycle suite and programs enables the end users and corporations to customize the software delivery process according to their requirements.

Read more about- Software Development Life cycle, ALM integration