The spirit behind every creative and innovative development of software companies is to provide the best solutions and facilitate the workflow of all types of organization. This leads to an increased need for high-quality software development services. To maintain quality, organizations follow a certain set of processes such as planning, designing, developing/configuring, testing, deploying, operating, and optimizing business applications to improve software development efficiency and lifecycle collaboration.

Application lifecycle management is not a new term in software development; it is one of the key processes that starts with the initial idea, followed by execution until the end of the application’s lifespan. The key here is to have synchronization between the process from start to finish.

For software companies, creating something new and unique has always been a time-consuming process, and staying competitive among competitors required sustained and cumulative planning. Each new app is staggeringly complex, and to maintain its usefulness, teams must overcome many challenges, such as time constraints and limited budgets, all with quality results. One solution to this dilemma is to improve lifecycle collaboration with application lifecycle management.

ALM, in fact, acts as a bridge that holds the development lifecycle together. ALM as a category of tools started with source code control tools, but with the growth of the software development process, different types of tools were added into the ALM space.

It is essential to collect tools. But the tools are not the only approach; the focus is how the tools are connected to achieve the end result. The main purpose of using ALM tools is to help and execute a project according to a plan and to gain control over a project. It is implemented to bridge the gap between team members, provides full traceability between project artifacts, and eliminates the need for unnecessary documentation issues. In a nutshell, it’s like balancing ALL phases of the application life cycle in one tool including a configuration management tool, a requirements tool, a bug tracking tool, or any integration between the different phases with the ability to total treatment between all project artifacts.

There are two key approaches to going with an ALM framework. The first approach is to gather ALM tools and integrate them based on requirements to create a custom ALM platform. The second approach is to install a full ALM platform.

Which method of approach is more ingenious, it all depends on the requirements of the organization; however, there are some guidelines that should be kept in mind when choosing a particular approach.

The first approach is to select the right toolset or integrated platform that will remove major bottlenecks and inefficiencies from the process. The main concern here is the cost of integration. While assembling a set of tools provides more flexibility to support the organization’s ALM process, the cost of integration must be considered to create the required ALM framework.

The other approach is to opt for a complete ALM platform suite. The key here is to make sure that the platform is flexible enough to adapt to the invoice, that is, to the organization’s process. An important aspect that we must consider is that these processes usually have many tacit rules; It’s not just what’s written in the manuals. One of the easy ways to get close is to look for the ability to “break the rules” in the ALM platform. If we decide to follow this approach, we must ensure that we should be in a position to modify the predefined process if necessary, to try innovative and creative ways of doing the process, or to handle an exceptional situation as and when. required.

It is a fact that over the years with the development of technology and the demand for high-quality software, ALM tools have been divided into a broad category. But with the right ALM process, we can identify the areas where we need to be more proactive to eliminate inefficiencies, and then select the right tools for the job.

The purpose of having an ALM tool should cover at least the following components: Requirements Management, Test Management, Project Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, Iteration Management, and Collaboration Management.