subject: Application Lifecycle Management-providing A Competitive Edge [print this page] Today's competitive business environment challenges the enterprises to provide faster delivery of goods and services. Such delivery schedules will require innovative solutions. Globalization and the advent of technological innovations over the years have paved way for the development of solutions to help the enterprises meet the challenges head on without any compromise on quality levels.
Nevertheless, developing solutions for complex business applications calls for efficiency in software development that can be achieved by the coordinating business management and software engineering, along with other tools such as software architecture, coding, testing systems and release management through a proper enforcement processes. The Application Lifecycle management (ALM) system is a continuous process that helps to manage the lifecycle of any applications through its development, maintenance, and governance and compatibility stages. The business value of the application is dependent on all these aspects with governance extending over the entire application lifecycle and including all of the decision-making and project management aspects. Development spans through an application's lifecycle and includes the process of creating an application and its multiple upgrades and newer versions. Operation refers to the work required to run an application.
Forrester defines Application Lifecycle Management as "The coordination of life-cycle activities for the development of software including requirements, modeling, development, building, and testing along with the management of relationships between development artifacts used or produced by these activities; and reporting on progress of the development effort as a whole." With enterprises developing a number of software to meet the ever-changing customer demands the IT infrastructure becomes loaded with applications. To facilitate a smooth functioning of all the applications in the networked environment, enterprises make use of IT service management tools and IT Help desk solutions.
Application Life cycle management solutions with its automated management system and ability to incorporate both traditional and agile methodology makes a desirable solution for the global organizations. Further, by supporting large number of application environments and globally spread teams, the ALM solutions can be interconnected with tools such as Requirement Management, Test management, Issues management, Risk management, release management and Project management. This not only facilitates easy implementation of software development cycle but also provides for easy access to the diverse teams.
The successful implementation of IT governance and compliance practices paves for an increased productivity levels in the organization. The application lifecycle management solutions being web based solution besides enabling multiple input methods also allows to import files from other document formats and create documents in multiple reporting formats including real-time dashboards. With customer being the vital factor of every business, these solutions provides every enterprise with a customer product management tool which gives the global enterprise a competitive edge over their rivals and helps them improve their business prospects.
