Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) has brought a new wave of disruption in the technology sector. ALM Software offers a unified platform to deliver applications from ideation to production and further visibility of the current state of the application to global teams.

Many technology teams confuse ALM with SDLC, but clearly, these are both distinct. ALM brings together business management along with software engineering thereby enabling technology teams to manage the life-cycle holistically. SDLC fails to integrate business logic while catering to the development aspects of the product lifecycle. 

Let us understand how SDLC differs from ALM. While ALM involves governance, development, and application management, SDLC only involves the system development part of the entire product lifecycle. SDLC is more often regarded as a subset of ALM.

Why is there a need for Application Lifecycle Management Solutions/Software?

Information, Agility, Visibility are some of the top benefits that might come to mind while zeroing in on an ALM software. However, there are various other benefits of ALM. It is a crucial aspect of app development. While it is important for outlining the methodologies, it is also essential to throw light on the tools that can be used for improving efficiency.

• Constructive Insights - All enterprises look for end-to-end visibility in their project along with accomplishing the business goals. It gets difficult in a non-synchronized development environment. Often people like managers, architects, analysts, etc. work in an individual manner and thereby, they have little or no information about the overall application development. A coordinated ecosystem helps professionals track the quality of work at every stage. The process helps all the members gain insight into the progress of the project and so, they can work in a much better way.
• Implementation of Best Practices - What happens when stakeholders in a project use different tools - a complete disconnection. A uniform engineering cycle is required for successful communication between stages, consistency and repeatability. In order to establish business practices like risk identification & mitigation, build verification, code verification, and requirements validation, it is important to implement a robust lifecycle management process.
• Healthy Collaboration - A real-time collaboration is required in every project lifecycle. When all the stakeholders use the same tool they are able to collaborate in a much better manner. All the teams like the product team, development team, QA team, and testing team require to be in a tandem with the project goal. A systematic cycle enables all team members in collaborating well.
• Better Customer Satisfaction - When team members are able to collaborate seamlessly, they are also in a position to understand client requirements in a much better manner. Since, transparency and visibility increase, so the client gets real-time updates on the project progress. The development activities are in line with the client requirements, thus, the client is offered exactly what he is looking for.
• Actionable Metrics - In any project lifecycle, it is important to have an automated metrics system that would help the team in receiving factual insights and creating value-added inputs. With actionable metrics, it is easier to create a real-time up to date information on the progress on the project. It has a hugely positive effect on the cost of the project as well.

ALM tools give a standardized environment for collaboration and communication between software development teams and associated departments like operations and testing. In addition, ALM automates the software development and delivery process.

For a long time, businesses were dealing with hassles such as cost overruns and missed deadlines and every discipline being separate, added to the pain. Organizations realized that efficiency could be attained only if all teams were integrated well and could collaboratively:

How Micro Focus is modernizing ALM to accelerate apps delivery?

At Micro Focus, Application Lifecycle Management is leveraged functionally. The goal lies in making quick application deliveries. The team strategically collaborates all the disciplines under the umbrella of ALM.

Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center is a highly flexible extensible and comprehensive application lifecycle. What happens to your project with the effect of ALM? With the establishment of a consistent process, managing requirements and business components become easier, thus, you get:

1. Improved quality
2. Increased speed
3. Reduced cost

Today’s business landscape calls for innovation at every step. The growth of a project lies in pacing well with the changes happening across the industry. The goals are always higher quality, security, and reliability.

Micro Focus has assisted several clients with its Application Lifecycle Management tools for healthy governance, and service quality obligations. One of the plus factors is, ALM helps in determining bottlenecks and identifying process gaps on time.

What you get when you get an ALM integrated:

Manage Changes - The version control system lets you meet with the tests, test assets and requirements to let the teams collaborate varied versions of assets while maintaining data integrity and giving audit history (of the changes) via the lifecycle. In addition, baselines capture all requirements, tests and test assets that can be compared for change impact and do rollbacks.

Bimodal IT - In any IT company, the teams are juggling with two different business needs: the need to deliver stable performance to meet with regular business functioning and another need is for responsiveness and flexibility to bring out business outcomes. ALM/Quality Center that suites mode 1, has close integration with Micro Focus ALM Octane that offers a bimodal IT solution for a streamlined process.

Powerful Insights -  Micro Focus ALM/Quality Center provides you with cross-project reporting and preconfigured business views that help in developing reports like requirements coverage, project status metrics, application quality metrics, and defect trends for both forms of releases- individual project view and enterprise release. ALM helps you drill down into the projects and take a holistic view of the project.

Risk-Based Test Planning - Given there are often limited resources, full testing is a challenge. ALM/Quality Center lets you test by giving recommendations that are based on failure probabilities, business criticalities, and functional complexities.

At Micro Focus, we enable you to have symmetry in the project by integrating ALM. Enterprises require a solution that can help them scale with regard to maturity and complexity. With no ALM integration, the resource requirement would be large and as a result, it would be tougher to assure test coverage of a huge number of changes.