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Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Achieve agility and have full control over your cyber-physical systems application lifecycle

What is Application Lifecycle Management?

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is an approach that encompasses all the people, tools, and processes required to manage the lifecycle of an application, from conception to retirement.

To understand well what ALM is it can be useful to compare it to the concept of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is the time we spend building the code. We can represent SLDC as a linear process, which you can see in the middle of the chart below. It starts with the Requirements. Then the line leads to Design, to Code, to Test, and eventually to Deploy. It is the classical Software Development Life Cycle. This works great and typically covers the entire life of a project.

Application lifecycle management (ALM) and Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Most companies develop software that spans beyond the project. We start with ideas, take them, brainstorm the idea, and figure out which ideas are worth investing in.

And then those ideas become a project. They go into the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the line in the middle. Deployment is the final stage of the SDLC but not the end of the Application Lifecycle Management because then it goes to the Operations field. An application needs to be monitored in the operations work. At the end of its life, this application may also be retired, after weeks or years. This means it goes out of service.

So Application lifecycle management encompasses more than just SDLC. It includes the activities before ideation and those after the Development, about Operations and Retirement.

And what about the term Cycle? The life of an application is a cycle process, not a linear flow. It is something that goes back and then loops forward again, no matter if you adopt Waterfall or Agile as methodologies for ALM development. Different aspects of the development are coordinated, thanks to a feedback mechanism. The application is got deployed then, we can have either enhancements or the introduction of new features, or bugs definition, etc. This operation mechanism becomes a feedback loop - a cycle - that goes into future iterations of the software development cycle.

Application Lifecycle Management with Polarion
An example of Application Lifecycle Management with Polarion

The Top 10 Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management

  • 1 Maximizes Stakeholder Satisfaction
  • 2 Reduce development Costs
  • 3 Improves Efficiency
  • 4 Increases Responsiveness
  • 5 Minimizes Downtime
  • 6 Reduces Delivery cycle time
  • 7 Improves Resource Utilization
  • 8 Reduces Risks
  • 9 Enhances team Satisfaction
  • 10 Provides an Enterprise view
Achieving software development agility in complex, regulated environments

White Paper

White paper discussing the need for application lifecycle management when developing applications in highly regulated industries.

How Application Lifecycle Management accelerates innovation unlocking team synergies

Organizations must accelerate innovation to stay competitive in most industries. Unlocking team synergies across disparate software development teams is paramount. Many organizations are still struggling with the old way of doing things. They focus on isolated process optimization instead of driving business value through comprehensive synchronization.

With a solution for Application Lifecycle Management like Polarion ALM, customers have been able to get their teams out of their silos and orchestrate development efforts across the entire application lifecycle. This approach has empowered stakeholders to better perform tasks in context and quickly make sound decisions based on real-time access to information.

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Software for Application Lifecycle Management

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