Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM): Process & Platforms

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a system that oversees the planning, development, testing, and maintenance of software applications. By incorporating people, tools, and processes into one system, ALM improves product quality and productivity while easing the burden on related products and services. In this blog post, we will discuss the benefits of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for businesses. We will also look at how ALM can improve the development process by incorporating frequent testing and adjusting development goals during the software lifecycle. Finally, we will examine how ALM helps ensure that all teams including developers, operations, and security are working together to create better 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.

Components/Stages of ALM:

ALM has a few stages as well. They include:

1. 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.  

2. Design – During this stage, the usability of the project is improved in order to enhance the satisfaction and loyalty of the customers. 

3. 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. 

4. 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. 

5. 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. 

6. 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. 

7. 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.

What are the benefits of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)?

There are many benefits of Application Lifecycle Management for businesses. Some of these benefits include:

• Real-Time Decision Making: Real-time planning and version control allow team leaders to easily map out an application’s future, so organizations can plan effectively using traditional waterfall or agile development projects. inform decisions when implementing interdependent Projects with complex oversight requirements.

• Improved Quality & Compliance: By incorporating people, tools, and processes into one system, ALM can help improve product quality. ALM gives your software development team the tools to create a high-quality application. Source code management and teamwork help to deliver quality results efficiently. Without communication between all parties, this process can be jeopardized, impacting the outcome of the product negatively. To avoid these issues, it is essential that everyone stays in sync during each stage—specifically the plan and create phases—of software development and information technology operations (DevOps).

• Increased Organizational Productivity: ALM helps improve productivity by incorporating frequent testing and adjusting development goals during the software lifecycle. With ALM, teams can start projects with sound methodology and precise estimations in place. Additionally, it provides support for resource planning in project management. Depending on requirements, certain tools become accessible – whether it be traditional waterfall projects or agile development projects. 

• Better Testing Practices – ALM provides organizations with the tools they need for end-to-end application development and testing. Clear communication between developers and testers is essential to identify issues quickly and resolve them efficiently. Having a completely automated and secure framework that is tested regularly is vital to a smooth application development process. ALM automation removes integration difficulties by allowing developers to merge their work effortlessly.

• Enhanced Agility – Implementing change is a crucial duty for any organization. To efficiently manage a project’s constantly changing landscape, there must be cohesive communication between software requirements, source code, build scripts, and test cases. Connected tools offer immediate feedback about the impacts of these changes, as well as ways to shorten reaction time. By making end-to-end traceability possible throughout the ALM process​ businesses can speed up application development or improvement quite significantly. This newfound agility allows organizations to better meet customer or business needs. 

• Eased Management Burden: ALM eases the management burden for related products and services by incorporating people, tools, and processes into one system. In order to have a successful website or product, excellent customer service is key. Along with that, ALM provides organizations with the ability to release applications quickly while still making sure customers are happy. This is accomplished by connecting and configuring the right apps.

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 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.