Benefits And Functionalities Of Integrated Application Lifecycle Management System

View artifacts managed by one Tool from another Tool.

Examples include list of Test cases from the Requirements Management Tool and Requirements from the Test case Management Tool, or list of design objects from the IDE. The benefit is even higher when multiple artifacts are accessible from a single tool.

Each individual stakeholder gets the benefit of accessing the artifacts from other tools without leaving their natural tool environment. This promotes collaboration and early problem detection, which can save a lot of errors and money.

Create various impacting and non-impacting relationships between

any two Artifacts.

This can manifest in creating a Traceability relation between a Requirement in Requirements Management Tool and Test case in the Test Management Tool; so that when the Requirement changes in one tool the Test case in the other tool will be flagged for impact. Another example is creating a dependency relation between a Change Request in an Issue / Change Management tool and the source code in the Configuration Management tool to track what files are modified to implement the Change.

Without this Traceability, the QA group could be testing an obsolete Requirement without being aware of it. In addition, without this feature, questions like why a single source file is affected by so many defects? cannot be answered.

Automate a process cutting across the tool boundaries and implement a complete ALM lifecycle without a break.

For example: a Change which starts its life in a Helpdesk tool as a Ticket, gets automatically replicated as a Change Request in the Issues Management tool/Change Management tool, gets approved by a Change Control Board, goes to the architect to create/ modify architectural artifacts in the Designer/ Modeling tool, goes to the developer for coding and to QA for creating Test cases in IDE and Test Management tools.

It is imperative to have an automated process workflow drive this across tool boundaries even when individual tools lack the processing capability. Without this process automation, the manual interfaces between tools are managed typically by emails and unstructured documents, inevitably resulting in dropping the ball at times.

Manage Projects and Resources across the tools.

For development managers, it has always been a vexing question to answer For a set of Requirements, Changes and Defects what will be the Release date given a set of Resources? Alternatively, the questions can be posed as Given a set of Resources and a Release date, what Requirements, Changes and Defects can we put in this release? or Given a Release date and a set of Requirements, Changes and Defects, what kind of resources do we need? We can make it even more complex by incorporating design and modeling objects, test automation and other Application Lifecycle Management artifacts in the mix. Since the artifacts involved are managed by various tools, only an Integrated ALM system will be able to handle this question.

Without an Integrated ALM, performing Project and Resource Management against just one artifact, say Requirements, will give an incomplete and wrong picture. The traditional PPM (Project Portfolio Management) software tool fails to take care of this because of a lack of integration with all other individual ALM tools.

Create Cross tools Analytics and Dashboards.

A Project managers assessment regarding the health of a particular development project can be massively flawed unless he/she takes into account the activities in all the tools involved. Analytics and reporting across various tools is very important at different levels including that of the CxO.

For example, an Integrated ALM system should be able to produce a Test compliance report for the end customer, who shows the list of Customer Requirements, Change Requests and Issues, traced to Test cases and individual Test runs. And finally, the Test run results should show that they have all passed. To produce a report like this requires retrieving information from various tools including Requirements Management, Issues / Change Management, Test Management and Test Automation.

Now that we have discussed the advantages of an Integrated ALM, we will next discuss three widely used options by vendors for achieving Integrated ALM, and how these options address the above functionality and benefits.

by: pbrown

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