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Wikipedia defines application lifecycle management (ALM) as “a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance. ALM is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.” Though most people equate ALM with software development life cycle (SDLC), ALM is much more than software development. As the name suggests, software development lifecycle refers to the development lifecycle of a software or application while ALM is the lifecycle management of an application i.e., from the moment an idea generated for developing an application to the very end of the life of the application. Development is definitely an integral part of ALM but ALM is not development alone. ALM has brought about a change of attitude with respect to software development. Earlier the different stakeholders involved in a software development project were concerned about their individual contributions to the development process and cared less about the outcome. For instance, the development team’s focus and attention ended once the completed software application is handed over to the operations team for deployment and maintenance. However, thanks to ALM, the various stakeholders are concerned about every stage of the application. Thus, with an ALM solution, enterprises can easily and effortlessly implement a software development life cycle (SDLC) process, collaborate on the entire development cycle and trace implementations back to original specifications. However, before deploying an ALM solutions, enterprises need to ensure that the ALM solution allows integration between various development tools. This is because even though they have purchased the best tools money can buy to make their development process more effective and even though they have trained their people in using these expensive tools, it results in nothing, if there is lack of integration between the various tools. With an integrated ALM solution, the project team can : • View artifacts managed by one Tool from another Tool - without paying for additional licenses or manual data transfer • Automate processes cutting across the tool boundaries and implement complete ALM lifecycle without the silos - no more cumbersome managing of tasks • Project and Resource Management across the tools - no more blind-spots due to lack of reliable data • Create various impacting and non-impacting traceability relationship between any two Artifacts - change management across the tools • Create cross tools Analytics, Metrics and Dashboards - a complete view of all aspects of the development projects • Free information from Tools Silos to create actionable intelligence - no more pockets of hidden inefficiencies Hence, by deploying best of the breed ALM solutions, enterprises can implement SDLC effortlessly and get the consolidated picture of their whole development projects instead of just pieces of the puzzle. Related Links - jira integration
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