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Why should an organization use an ALM solution? The Application Lifecycle Management – ALM Solution has become essential for a well-managed product development organization that wishes to deliver a high quality and competitive product with very timely delivery and multiple releases that are weeks apart and not several months apart as it used to be! The concepts of Agile methodology and DevOps for continuous build, test and release cannot be achieved without a good combination of tools that are interconnected or working off of a common data repository.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts an overall 14.3% increase in projected employment from 2010 to 2020 (growing from 143 million to 163 million). What’s helping drive that increase? Software and application development! The table below shows that the Bureau expects jobs and roles related to software development and application delivery to grow at roughly twice the national average rate through 2020.
| Job/Role | Employment number change through 2020, in thousands |
| Software Developers, Systems Software | 127.2 |
| Software Developers, Applications | 143.8 |
| Computer Systems Analysts | 120.4 |
| Information Security Analysts, Web Developers, and Computer Network Architects | 65.7 |
* Source: Forrester Blog
This indicates that the software industry is all set to grow; hence, competition is going to be intense for good resources globally. Organizations have to deliver quality products right on time. A lot of best practice methods should be implemented to reach that level. And that is the reason organizations need to have an ALM solution adoption strategy in place.
A standard ALM solution allows to set up the best practice methods, process automation and end-to-end traceability so that it becomes easy to manage application development projects involving any number of team members located anywhere in the world and using any combination of point tools. An ALM solution helps to increase agility by providing smooth, sometimes automated, data flow across all the departments associated with the application lifecycle. Here is where an ALM solution adds value to help improve performance.
- It ensures that the team focuses on the latest, approved set of Requirements
- It reduces rework-related productivity loss
- It eliminates unnecessary and repetitive activities through process automation
- It incorporates traceability among all the artifacts
- It allows managers to look at real-time data and make the right decisions faster
- It reduces the number of defects due to miscommunication or lack of unified information
- Overall, an ALM solution helps to ensure that the final product is close to the requirements provided
Multi-functional ALM platform with cross-vendor tools and in many cases, open-source tools integration capability could be the right choice. Such a solution provides all the capabilities mentioned above and at the same time, it allows you to follow your preferred methodologies and best-of-the-breed tools.
So, do not let your functional groups make choices that suit them only without regard to an overall integrated tools strategy that the entire organization can benefit from and gain a competitive differentiation for a modern application development scenario that will satisfy Agile, DevOps, Mobile and Big Data world that we have to live in.
