Application Lifecycle Management - ALM

Kovair Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution provides a rich and configurable, global platform for implementing a software development life cycle  (SDLC) process, collaborating on the entire development cycle and tracing implementations back to original specs. Kovair Requirements Management ensures that all developers are working from the same playbook, no matter where they are located, and that there are no costly last minute surprises -- whether the project was developed in the office next door, or by an offshore partner 10,000 miles and 10 time zones away. The result is a top-quality application that matches what the user asked for and complies with all internal and external requirements. Scroll down to see the details of the industry leading Application Lifecycle Management solution /ALM software offered by Kovair.

Requirement Management

A full featured industry strength Requirements Management tool with rich text description, reuse, versioning, automated graphical process, back and forth traceability relations with proactive and reactive impact analysis, Microsoft Word and Excel import, and Requirements document generation. Requirements are related / linked with Testcases, Risks and Releases.

Test Management (includes Testcases and Test Sets)

Whether you do a manual or automated testing, Kovair's Test Management tool manages individual Test cases (aka Test Plans in some other tools) or a collection of them executed in a particular order in a Test Set (aka Test Lab in some other tools). An impacting many-to-many relation with built-in Requirements Management allows changes in Requirements to percolate through the linked Test cases. Managing multiple Test runs for each Test case allows a complete history of testing in the context of linked requirements. Furthermore, issues can be created from the failed Testcases.

Issues Management

It is remarkable how an age old tool like bug tracking can be made so powerful and flexible. Kovair's Issues Management tool with visual task based workflow process engine is ready to tackle the most demanding bugs and other issue tracking needs of a geographically distributed team. Reports and Dashboards of trends bring the status of quality management to the front and center of the development process.

Risk Management

For a critical development project Risks are the Issues waiting to happen! A systematic identification, tracking and mitigation planning of Risks for various categories make a development project well managed. When a Risk finally happens an Issue can be generated out of it and resolved based on the mitigation plan.

Release Management

One of the most overlooked areas of the development management, Kovair Release Management helps hold all the other artifacts (Requirements, Test, Issues) together in the context of each Release. This makes planning for a Release a breeze. Also creating a publish quality Release Note to show all the new enhancements (Requirements, Issues and bug fixes) included in a Release is just a matter of a single click in Kovair. A pre-formatted Release Note can be printed in Word format from real time data in the Kovair repository that can be easily provided to marketing, sales and customers.

Project Management

Kovair has created an architecture of Workspaces to give development groups the freedom of choosing their own project hierarchy. A Workspace can be used for a single Project or multiple Projects independent of the definition of Project. If one wants to use the term Program or Product instead of Project, one can go ahead and use it within the framework of the Workspace. With flexibility of creating unlimited independent Workspaces for Kovair Application Lifecycle Management solution, each Workspace can be inherited from an existing one as a template and then further configured to a specific need or a unique functional application.

Each of these applications in their own rights compete well with the traditional standalone tools from other vendors. However, these Kovair applications working together in a single repository provide unprecedented advantages to a development organization to implement Applications Lifecycle Management in the most optimal manner. Integrated Omniprocess via IT Project Management allows for a unique process automation of each of these applications thus allowing the users to implement any development methodology including a proprietary one.

Product Features

100% Web-based

A Web architected grounds-up framework accessible through popular browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and others from anywhere anytime.

Multiple Input Methods

In Kovair ALM Studio, you can capture any item (Requirements, Issues , Testcases) in any of the following ways:

• Using the Rich Text Editor in Kovair, you can open a Microsoft Word document or copy-paste a portion of a formatted text to the Rich Text Editor.
• Submit inputs from a Corporate Website or Portal
• Send them by Email
• Import them from Microsoft Word Document
• Import them from Microsoft Excel spreadsheet
• Import form a CSV file with configurable format
• From any third party tools in realtime if synchronized through Kovairs Omnibus Integration Bus

Entity Relations

Though Traceability is a more common feature for a Requirements Management tool, Application Lifecycle Management solution has extended the concept of Traceability Relations and made it a central feature for all of its built-in applications.

Kovair allows multiple types of relations including custom ones between Issues . The relations between Issues include dependency relation, and duplicate relation.

IT Process Automation

The Application Lifecycle Management solution through the capabilities of its built in Omniprocess Workflow engine facilitates complete IT process automation of the built-in applications.

Reporting

Application Lifecycle Management solution can produce reports and documents of various kinds using multiple reporting options:

• HTML, enabling direct printing from the application
• Export any lists to Excel for additional formatting and manipulation
• Built-in Crystal Reports offer easy ways to perform custom formatting, or create your own reports
• Word Reporting enables fully customizable formatting with multi-level data elements from Kovair Global Lifecycle data repository in real time
• Dashboard Report with real time data from the system for reporting any aspect of the project including the entire Project Health or Process Indices Report with Graphical, Tabular and Chart formats

Product Benefits

Capture the Voice of the Customer Product Management

With Kovairs multiple capabilities of capturing inputs from customers by emails, website based inputs or importing of customer documents and putting them through a well defined Requirements Review Process with the Kovair Omniprocess workflow by analysts and their management, a company can set up an excellent system of capturing customer inputs both for new product ideas as well as improvements of existing products. These inputs coupled with inputs from other sources such as Helpdesk provide Product Management personnel with a proper tool to review these inputs and create a Product Requirements Document in Word that can be generated automatically within Kovair at any time.

This provides any company; large or small, a very critical tool to not miss any inputs from a customer that are always a key factor in enhancing customer satisfaction as well as bringing a competitive edge to a company's its product lines and improving its business and market share. The payback of this system cannot be underestimated!

Evaluate and Prioritize Requirements for Releases

Kovair's Requirements Ranking capabilities and What if Analysis capabilities for Release Management Process, provide any Product, Marketing and Engineering Management groups a very easy and methodical way of analyzing the content of a given release and make sound decisions that are logic and payback based rather than gut based from certain individuals. This simplifies further buy-in of the outcome and puts all groups in complete harmony moving forward in developing and managing a good product release.

Increased Productivity

Formalizing and automating Application Life cycle Management and enabling reuse of requirements speeds project completion by anywhere from 20 to-30% versus ad hoc or manual processes for managing requirements through Word documents or Spread sheets. So companies cannot and should not think that this type of tool is only essential in a large organization. A good process and methodology allows small companies to grow faster and better manage their growth much better with proper tools that create good quality and enhanced productivity.

Better Quality - No more redos

Having one version of the truth captured and shared globally by all developers creates fewer design errors going through the implementation cycle. This results in significantly less testing time and almost no reworking of the application after system testing. Total project labor cost is saved by 10-20%.

Better team collaboration and communication

A shared single repository enabled through global web-based access to the Requirements means no errors because distributed teams are working with the same specifications, and anyone with the appropriate permission can make changes with automatic notifications sent to other team members based on the Change Management Process set up in the Kovair Application Lifecycle Management System.

Manage regulatory compliance automatically

Regulations are really just requirements generated externally. With 100% backwards and forwards traceability, regulatory compliance is automatically ensured if managed through Kovair Global Lifecycle/RM, mitigating risk to any business.

Download our resources to learn about ALM implementation with Kovair.

Integration with other tools

Although Kovair's Application Lifecycle Management solution is fairly complete in terms of major development management tools, it can integrate  with various other development tools, if there is a need, including Visual Studio IDE , Configuration Management and Build Management. Kovair's Omnibus service integration bus technology allows organizations to integrate external best-of-breed tools from third- party vendors with Kovair ALM tools as well as  internal tools to create a total ALM ecosystem. To use Kovair's Omnibus Integration technology, you need Kovair's enterprise service bus architecture solution product. In addition, Kovair's enterprise solution allows organizations to create their own applications using its highly user friendly drag-and-drop feature. 

Contact us at sales@kovair.com