Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is emerging as a promising approach to improving the software delivery process. However, "traditional" ALM hasn't been able to reach its full potential for delivering business value. Why? Because vendors are aggressively pushing restrictive, end-to-end ALM solutions that aim to lock customers into proprietary IT platforms. Customers soon find that these solutions don't integrate well with their existing development processes, tools and platforms. Unfortunately, this leaves software development teams with disconnected processes and silos of ALM data, which in turn prevents them from realising the full value of ALM.
To overcome this challenge, a new approach is required, one that enables customers to deliver software on top of a mixed development environment. With Open ALM solutions, organisations can leverage their existing software development assets
and IP and achieve visibility, traceability and discipline across the complete
software delivery cycle. Customers can now benefit from an optimised ALM platform, with the advantages of a fully connected, managed and measurable software
delivery process.
Predictable Software Delivery: Mission Impossible?
Software development is an intrinsically complicated undertaking. Delivering reasonably defined software within acceptable quality, budget and time-to-market constraints requires constant coordination of a vast number of activities among many professionals. The complexity of managing and tracking software delivery projects increases when organisations decide to leverage distributed development models, such as offshore development or outsourcing. As a result, project cancellations and failures are ubiquitous. Cost overruns, schedule slippages, low quality and poor reliability are disturbing norms in the software industry.
Consequently, software development organisations have been increasingly pressured to become more mature and to adopt well-orchestrated, systematic and process-centric approaches that follow the steps of more traditional engineering disciplines. With growing standardisation and adoption of enterprise development platforms, the challenges facing the industry have become less technical in nature.
Rather, the ability to achieve consistent and predictable value from software development has become a top priority for many software executives who need the confidence that their teams will be effective in their delivery. With this in mind, companies have designed ALM platforms to address the demand for consistency and predictability of software delivery.
The Emergence of ALM
As the application development tools industry responds to the need for predictable software delivery, it has expanded its focus beyond tools for individual developer productivity. Vendors have expanded the breadth of their portfolios to address additional roles in the delivery process, and integrated existing and new capabilities into their offerings. These suites of products, often marketed and sold as team-based development platforms, have marked the emergence of Application Lifecycle Management, or ALM, as a new market category and as a software development discipline.
ALM platforms specifically address the challenge of increasing the consistency and predictability of software delivery. They do that by providing integration and automation for each of the major roles that participates in the process, and by automating the following capabilities:
Measurability
- Enabling the definition of systems of measures around quality, productivity, progress and risk
- Reporting and analysing such metrics throughout project execution
Alignment
- Aligning LOB and IT priorities
- Aligning project outcomes with expectations of end users
Discipline
- Defining, deploying and tracking compliance with software processes
- Introducing more rigor to the process of managing change and predicting its impact.
These capabilities enable IT managers to balance and prioritise their software project portfolios, while achieving increased levels of control over their teams and much better visibility into project execution. With ALM, executives can also be assured that the software development process is far more auditable, which supports better corporate governance and helps the organisation to demonstrate compliance with various regulations.
The ALM Industry
Today ALM is an established trend and a growing industry, which is recognised by industry analysts. ALM vendors provide a wide array of tools and technologies to support the process of software development. These tools go well beyond the traditional focus on individual developer productivity, and attempt to deliver a team-oriented methodology and tooling for software delivery.
To deliver a viable ALM solution, vendors must address the “extended” application development team, and include roles that participate in the wider process:
- Executive needs are addressed with portfolio-level dashboards that surface important project metrics such as risk, progress and quality.
- Project managers’ needs are addressed with tools for project planning and tracking, tradeoff analysis and resource allocation.
- Analysts’ needs are addressed with tools to facilitate requirements definition, interaction with end users and other stakeholders, and the management of requirements throughout the project lifecycle, including changes over time.
- Architects’ needs are addressed with tools to facilitate visual modeling of various application aspects (components, data, process) as well as tools for describing design patterns and enterprise architectures.
- Developers’ needs are addressed with sophisticated coding environments, as well as with code-level quality tools, such as performance profilers, unit-testing frameworks and automated code audits.
- Quality assurance engineers’ needs are met with tools for test creation and management, automated regression and functional testing, and automated performance testing.
- The needs of the overall team are addressed with team-wide infrastructure that provides facilities for collaboration, process guidance, change management and version control.
- Software process managers’ needs are addressed with tools for modeling and deploying a set of enterprise-wide process standards.
- The needs of end users and business stakeholders are addressed with tools that automate demand management and provide self-service capabilities around communicating requirements, reporting defects and tracking their delivery status.
ALM is widely recognised as a huge leap forward for the application development tools industry and for its customers. Interestingly, the latest Chaos report from the Standish Group indicates that failure rates of software projects have decreased
to about half compared with a decade ago, an improvement that can be partly attributed to the emergence of ALM. However, deeper investigation of customer needs reveals that despite the obvious benefits of ALM, its full potential is still difficult to realise without changing the fundamental approach used to integrate processes and tools that are used across the software lifecycle.
Open ALM
Most organizations pose big challenges for ALM vendors – they would like to get the huge value associated with ALM, namely a dramatically improved software delivery process that yields the required consistency and predictability. However, on top of that ALM customers also want:
- To be able to use a mix of runtime platforms in a manner optimised to their business objectives
- The freedom to use a mix of commercial and open source application development tools, which are optimised to the deployment targets that they decide to utilise
- The freedom to use a variety of commercial or custom software development processes that are optimised to organisation culture, project types and underlying technology.
To address this challenging set of requirements, a new approach for ALM is needed, an approach that enables customers to unlock the full value of ALM on top of a heterogeneous IT environment. Open ALM is directly aimed at addressing this challenge. It is designed to enable IT organisations to predictably deliver software on their own terms.
Benefits of Open ALM
Open ALM provides the functional value of ALM while introducing unprecedented levels of flexibility at the process, tools and platform levels. More specifically, Open ALM customers would:
- Be free to choose any combination of platforms and runtime environments in the context of a single software project or across different projects, based on business priorities and project fit
- Be free to choose the best development tools for chosen platforms, per economic considerations, specific productivity enhancement and technical fit
- Be free to choose or design development processes that are best fit for their projects and chosen platforms, as well as match their organisational culture and time-to-market needs
The Open ALM platform and its supporting tools will, for the first time, enable IT organisations that deploy heterogeneous application development environments to:
- Gain unparalleled, multidimensional and customisable visibility into progress, quality and risk metrics of projects and portfolios, to support project management and process improvement initiatives
- Reach the holy grail of full lifecycle traceability to support true alignment of business objectives and development activities, better correlation between end-user expectations and project outcome as well as better project management through accurate and comprehensive impact analysis
- Achieve a new level of control over software delivery through automated process-driven orchestration of practitioners and tools that participate in the lifecycle
These capabilities enable superior team productivity, support quality initiatives and ease the burden of compliance with internal and external regulations. They will be delivered in a set of infrastructure-level components and enterprise ALM management tools.
