Enhance Collaboration And Cohesiveness With Application Lifecycle Management

By Author: martin well
Total Articles: 364
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Today an increasing number of enterprises have a global team providing software R&D services .However, the distributed teams often face unique challenges such as:

• Team members not being on the same page with respect to work item priorities
• Lack of real-time collaboration
• Lack of visibility for the whole project, forming silos and general misalignment

Though these issues seem harmless, it can be real bottlenecks when it comes to Agile product development. Wikipedia defines agile software development as “a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change.” It clearly points out that in Agile cohesiveness and a shared understanding within the team are imperative for project success.

The product development process involves the efforts ...
... of a team of stakeholders such as business analysts, architects, developers, testers and managers. Each shareholder has a specific task to perform which can be done better if there is increased collaboration between the shareholders and increased synchronization between the different practitioner tools. Hence, what is required is an effective application development solution that can help enterprises to

• Quickly adapt to changing requirements
• Maintain product quality
• Meet launch deadlines
• Develop fully tested, potentially shippable product each time

The solution is application lifecycle management which is “the capability to integrate, coordinate, and manage the different phases of the software delivery process. From development to deployment, ALM is a set of pre-defined process and tools that include definition, design, development, testing, deployment, and management. Throughout the ALM process, each of these steps are closely monitored and controlled.”

A leading software R&D service provider has come up with an integrated suite of industry-leading application lifecycle management tools and applications for distributed Agile product development. The following are some of the advantages of this platform.

• Enable collaboration by utilizing reports and dashboards that provide real-time visibility throughout the development process
• Provide end-to-end traceability between work items, starting from business requirements and extending all the way to final test execution results and release decision support
• Help distributed teams identify bottlenecks early and accelerate product development
• Address functional areas such as Requirement Management, Agile Project Management, Test

Management, Build Management, Source Control, Reports and KPI's
Thus application lifecycle management help enterprises to increase productivity, attain greater traceability, and deliver good quality and satisfactory software products.

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