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Applications are an important part of our lives; it has a lifecycle and the management of the same is called ALM (Application Lifecycle Management). All the important functions like automation, development, publishing new versions, documentation, facilitation, testing, and deployment are a part of ALM. You may choose any development method, Application Lifecycle Management provides the tools and infrastructure to help you in achieving your goals.
What is ALM?
It is a type of facilitator that facilitates the application lifecycle to be automated, controlled and monitored through various tools and infrastructures built specifically to optimize the application. The correct implementation of ALM renders, improves communication, automates regulatory compliance and rapid organizational growth through effective application monitoring methods.
1. Requirements Analysis & Management
It is important to understand the requirements of ALM. The analysis of requirements to an effective ALM is the micro focus of most businesses today. It is a tool that can collect, compute, track and manage the requirements of an application throughout the lifecycle. It has features that can incur functionalities like tracking, baselining, and intelligent reporting by process-oriented methods that can enable rapid collaboration of project teams on the requirements point of view.
Requirement Management Tools can provide a hierarchical based structure for the documentation of each requirement. It also provides various computational and parsing methods for requirement data. Module setup for feedback and stakeholder inputs can be developed through a requirement management tool. Tracking of regular changes and process-driven testing control. Full version deployments and its requirements can be managed along with the version history archive.
2. Modeling and Design Management
Designing an application is not usually a part of ALM, though the management of designing and modeling of application infrastructure is quite essential. Most of the applications are designed using UML profiles and tools designed to comply with framework specifications. Packaging the assets and artifacts of an application as Reusable Assets Specification (RAS) assets provides an easy way to exchange assets with remote or local users. For these assets management, RAS repositories can be created storing all the assets to be exchanged.
The management of assets, infrastructure, repositories, and UML profiles can be effectively achieved using a Modeling and Design Management Tool. These tools also ensure infrastructure capabilities of an application compatible with the process and achieving the organizational goals through effective tracing and monitoring.
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3. Project Management
Project management is never an easy element of any ALM. Features that a project management tool provides for Application Lifecycle Management are –
- Planning – It helps you manage the planning and deployment work divided into phases and subphases with better workflows to follow upon.
- Collaboration – Collaboration of various departments, teams, and stakeholders can be achieved through task assignments, internal communications, and an organized dashboard.
- Documentation – Documentation of each phase, task, result, version, etc. can be achieved through the project management tool.
- Evaluation – The most important part, where the evaluation of all the deployed assets can present data that can be matched with the regulatory data and test the compliance.
4. Configuration and Build Management
An application build system compiles app resources and source code. These are packaged into applications that can be tested, deployed, signed, and distributed. A configuration management tool can help to manage and automate the build process while permitting a developer to describe flexible custom build configurations.
Each build configuration will be capable of defining its own code and resources with a common logic for all the versions. So, the businesses rent coders that can enhance the configuration of the application using a configuration management tool. The output of the build will remain the same whether a project from the command line is built on a remote machine or using any platform.
5. Testing and Release Management
The management of application testing and deployment can be enhanced with the continuous integration and deployment methodology. This methodology can be achieved through testing and release management tools. Other features like automation of testing and integrated deployment make these testing and release management tools as necessary mechanisms to work on.
Another benefit of testing app versions is; it keeps the older versions up and running. This ensures user engagement and application productivity through no crashes and application upgrade without degrading current status.
6. Issue Management
Issues management can be considered as a maintenance tool. Application deployment leads to regular evaluation and calibration according to the regulatory compliances. Issues like bugs, fixes and security can be effectively managed through the issue management tools. Further, these tools can ensure better inter-team issue handling and ensure good productivity.
These tools provide comprehensive solutions towards different issues and manage them to provide a synchronized and smooth process that can give results as per the organizational goals and ensure application to run along the lifecycle without crashes and downtime.
Conclusion
These tools can render the management of different objects that constitute the management of Application Lifecycle Management. These tools are provided by various vendors across the globe, some firms even provide integrated tools packages that can have all these tools to manage ALM.
While the agile technologies improve the application development processes by making them move faster and lighter, ALM makes these myriad projects to achieve progress and be lighter with highly functional applications throughout its lifecycle.
