Application Lifecycle Management | Complete Guide
Key Components of ALM
Table of Contents
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a process that involves the planning, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of software applications. To effectively manage the lifecycle of an application, it is important to have a comprehensive ALM strategy in place. This strategy should include a set of key components that help to streamline the process and ensure that all stages of the lifecycle are managed efficiently. In this article, we will discuss the key components of ALM and how they can help organizations to develop and deliver high-quality software applications.
What is Application Lifecycle Management?
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is an integrated system of people, tools, and processes that supervise a software application from its initial planning and development, through testing and maintenance, and into decommissioning and retirement. By combining and organizing the elements of an application’s lifecycle, ALM improves product quality, optimizes productivity, and eases the management burden for related products and services.
In simpler terms, Application Lifecycle Management, abbreviated as ALM, is the procedure of specifying, designing, documenting, and testing the application. It covers the whole lifecycle from the start to the end of the project. It begins with the idea of the application throughout the development, goes to testing, deployment, support, and finally, the user experience.
Adopting application lifecycle management is essential for organizations in order to ensure prompt plus good quality releases keeping in mind the budget. Also, using traditional methods for lifecycle management like MS Office on one hand makes sense as it is cost-efficient as well as easy to get used to. But on the other hand, there are several drawbacks of using MS Office such as too much manual work, detecting issues can be a nightmare, and providing compliance is next to impossible. Hence, it is essential to use the right ADLM solution and give up traditional methods like MS Office.
How does Application Lifecycle Management work?
ALM helps companies set requirements for projects at the outset. This ensures that everyone involved in the project understands what needs to be accomplished. ALM also incorporates frequent testing throughout the development process. This allows developers to catch errors early on before they become expensive problems. Additionally, ALM helps developers adjust their development processes and goals during the software lifecycle. This ensures that the application is always meeting the needs of the business. Finally, ALM helps ensure that all teams including development, operations, and security are working together to create better applications.
Key Components of ALM
ALM has a few important components. They include:
- Requirement Management – This is the first and foremost step in the ALM cycle. During this stage, requirements are documented, analyzed, tracked, and prioritized. This process goes on throughout the whole lifecycle of the project.
- Design – During this stage, the usability of the project is improved in order to enhance the satisfaction and loyalty of the customers.
- Build Management – During this stage, the source code files are converted into standalone software components. Basically, the idea of the application turns into an actual application during build management. Application is built, tested, and deployed during this stage and testers commence drafting the test cases and test scripts for further testing of the application.
- Software Configuration Management – Abbreviated as SCM, is a stage when the deployment team works on the systematic organization and management of the project. They also control the changes that are made in the documents, codes and other entities during the ADLM.
- Operation and Maintenance Management – During this stage, basically the whole application is monitored and bugs are identified as well as resolved. Through this, you are able to plan and prioritize the next update on the project.
- Test Management – This stage is also known as the testing stage. The testers verify that the application is properly complying with the requirements stated during the initial processes.
- User Experience – This can be said as the longest stage in the whole ALM procedure. In this stage, the major participation of testers and developers is not required. Instead, the participation of users is highly important. They basically check out the whole application and share their feedback. After that, the final application is launched or delivered.
Why Choose Visure as your ALM tool?
Visure is one of the most trusted ALM platforms that specialize in requirements management for organizations of all sizes across the globe. The major partners of Visure include business-critical and safety-critical companies. Visure integrates through the whole ALM processes including risk management, issue and defect tracking, traceability management, change management, and various other areas like quality analysis, requirements versioning, and powerful reporting.
The features that are like the most about Visure include:
- Requirements Management – With Visure, you’ll be able to customize your requirements management process at any level, selecting specific items to get traced within the tool or between other automatic and bi-directional integration tools, such as Jira. The configuration begins by creating your Data Models, which will serve as your process and workflow. As a result, this will enforce full traceability and compliance within all systems development teams and projects.
- Flexible User Interface – Visure guarantees the integration of the solutions with other tools that have already been implemented with open standards and connectors. Visure also provides personalized technical support to its clients and helps them implement initiatives that will help them improve their requirements management procedures.
- Risk Management – With the Visure FMEA extension, engineering teams gain a complete out-of-the-box solution that shows risks and their potential hazards in the project and their corresponding values for detection, severity, occurrence, and any required information such as potential.
- Quality Assistance – Our clients receive the best quality assistance from writing down your requirement models and providing on-premises services. Visure assists you when you can not trust the cloud for your private data. We also provide quality analysis for the requirements processes in your organization in order to ensure for things run as smoothly as possible.
- Integration – Data analysts can create relationships, generate hierarchies, manage traceability, and automatically capture requirements from MS Excel, Outlook, and MS Word. Visure also supports integration with other ALM tools like IBM DOORS and Jira through Requirement Interchange Format OMG standards.
Conclusion
Application Lifecycle Management is an important system for people, tools, and processes that supervise a software application from its initial planning and development, through testing and maintenance, and into decommissioning and retirement. By combining and organizing the elements of an application’s lifecycle, ALM improves product quality, optimizes productivity, and eases the management and maintenance burden for related products and services.
ALM helps companies set and meet appropriate requirements for projects. ALM also improves the development process by incorporating frequent, thorough testing. It also helps developers adjust development processes and goals during the software lifecycle. Finally, ALM helps ensure that all teams including development, operations, and security needs are met.
There are many benefits of Application Lifecycle Management, which is why it’s important to choose the right ALM platform for your organization. At Visure, we specialize in requirements management and offer a complete out-of-the-box solution that shows risks and their potential hazards in the project. Try out the free 30-day trial now to see how Visure can benefit your organization.
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