What is application lifecycle management ALM?

This system includes the people, tools, and processes that allow the company to successfully navigate each stage of the lifecycle and move from one phase to the next. Application lifecycle management supports agile and DevOps development approaches by integrating these disciplines together and enabling teams to collaborate more effectively for your organization.. The various ALM stages offer clear steps for application development, thereby making the entire planning process faster and more efficient. In addition, having a clear plan for the application makes it easier to estimate the time and resources required to develop an effective product.

Application lifecycle management includes the operation of an application that has already been developed and deployed by the organization. Application operations begin once an application has been deployed and continues through to the end of the application life cycle. By contrast, ALM encourages a holistic approach to your Salesforce development. Salesforce features, your “applications”, are viewed almost as a living organism with a “lifecycle” of various stages, all of which must be considered.

Why Application Development Lifecycle Management Is Important

In this stage, an application idea transforms into an actual application. Specifying requirements usually happens top-down, meaning the needs start with the most general and move into the more specific and detailed. As a result, case requirements are often in a hierarchical tree structure, with each node representing a more specific sub-requirement for a more general parent node. However, other development approaches, such as the iterative Agile development process, use less hierarchical structures to list requirements, with the defined needs identified as use cases. When defining requirements, all stakeholders gather to declare what they need from the application to support their business cases.

As soon as teams build a full version of the application, it must undergo a series of tests to ensure it behaves as planned. This is a crucial step to uncover any bugs that will cause the application to break. We usually test by imitating all possible user interactions within the application and observing the application’s behavior.

What Are the Common Stages in Application Lifecycle Management?

At its core, ALM is an all-encompassing framework that manages the lifespan of software applications from conception to end-of-life. It includes governance, development, maintenance, and improvement of software applications. The requirements management, design, development, testing and what is alm quality assurance (QA), deployment, and maintenance phases make up the ALM process. ALM tools are employed to automate and optimize the development and deployment process of software applications. These tools are essential for achieving business analysis and software quality goals.

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It also determines how the application is serviced throughout its lifespan and final disposal at the end of that time. The most critical aspect of governance occurs at the idea stage before any significant resources are committed. This is when the concept of creating an application must be analyzed for value.

It can involve tasks like testing, problem patching, and performance optimization, as well as the management of the complete life cycle of a software product from inception to deployment. The third phase, Testing and Quality Assurance, would see the application undergo extensive testing. Automated and manual testing techniques would be employed to ensure that the application works as expected, and the UX (user experience) matches the expected standards.

• Additionally, ALM software can automate the management process to help you save time and resources.
• Finally, during the Maintenance and Support phase, the company would provide regular app updates, troubleshoot issues, and offer user support.
• This includes establishing initial ALM requirements, governance, and methodologies.
• This approach allows for faster development and deployment, with a focus on continuous integration, testing, and delivery.
• Although the five stages of ITAM are similar to the stages of ALM, they are different terms.
• Two common acronyms that are often used interchangeably in the IT field are asset lifecycle management (ALM) and IT asset lifecycle management (ITAM).

One more step of testing is aimed to confirm that the app aligns with users’ expectations and supporters’ (in the financial or marketing sphere) needs to move further in the lifecycle. ALM tools stand out because they provide complete requirements’ traceability and timely validation. One of the essential ALM characteristics implies the active participation of the QA team in the earliest stages. Thus, testers can authorize test plans and fully understand the conditions from the outset. SCM or software configuration management is sometimes considered a separate ALM phase for arranging, monitoring, and handling the code modifications, documentation, and other elements of the app development cycle.

Important milestones of this phase are setting up the development and acceptance environments, developing the software, documentation and installing the solutions in the integration environment. Traditional software development methods, such as the sequential waterfall model, become increasingly inefficient in a fast-paced IT landscape. ALM comes from a need for a more iterative model that can keep pace with the sheer number of applications an individual company tends to deploy today. As these tools are helpful across the phases of your ALM, they give you a truly “integrated” lifecycle.