What is application lifecycle management?

An integrated system of people, tools, and processes called application lifecycle management (ALM) controls the creation, testing, upkeep, decommissioning, and retirement of software applications. By organizing and unifying the components of an application's lifetime, ALM improves product quality, boosts productivity, and reduces the administration and maintenance burden for related goods and services.

Using ALM solutions has several advantages, including the automation of software development and deployment processes, aid in achieving and maintaining compliance, and the creation of a standardized environment for team collaboration and communication.

Why is ALM important?

ALM helps organizations create and sustain appropriate project standards. ALM improves the development process by incorporating frequent, rigorous testing. It also helps developers adjust their goals and methods for developing software during the course of its lifespan. Finally, ALM ensures that all teams, including development, operations, and security, can collaborate effectively to generate the best software.

Leading software vendors regularly update their offerings as well. Application lifecycle management gives businesses a competitive edge and high levels of productivity by streamlining workflows and ensuring the release of high-quality products.

What is ALM used for?

ALM provides a framework for determining requirements and creating policies, governance, and methods prior to releasing software. ALM offers the framework for developing, assessing, and maintaining software. Before software is made accessible for usage in actual settings, it is also constructed with safeguards and checks to ensure that it complies with compliance, governance, effectiveness, usability, performance, and other requirements. Finally, ALM allows companies ongoing opportunities to assess productivity to ensure they fulfill their ROI objectives for software development as well as to review and adjust expenditures to accommodate changing financial limitations.

What is the ALM process?

Executive team members, stakeholders, and DevSecOps teams all frequently have the opportunity to:

• Throughout the lifecycle, establish and maintain the governance and compliance needs.
• Develop methods for managing and regulating development, testing, and maintenance tasks.
• Constantly check that testing meets functional, performance, usability, and security criteria.

As will be explained in more detail in the following section, the ALM process makes sure that all aspects for all phases of application lifecycle management are expressly developed and handled.

Stages of ALM

Application lifecycle management consists of five stages:

1. Defining requirements
2. Development of the product
3. Testing and quality assurance
4. Deployment
5. Continuous maintenance and improvement of the product

1. Defining requirements

When developing requirements, all stakeholders come together to discuss what they need from the application to support their business cases. A design of the application is created based on their specific needs. Requirements may also include compliance and governance norms, as well as the stakeholders' business requirements.

Frequently, the process of establishing requirements is top-down, beginning with the most fundamental criteria and working up to the most complex and specific ones. Case requirements often take the form of a hierarchical tree structure because each node reflects a more specific sub-requirement for a more general parent node. Other development approaches, such as iterative Agile development, define the established needs as use cases rather than using hierarchical frameworks to specify requirements.

2. Development of the product

The product may be created after the team has agreed upon the specs. At this stage, the product moves from a conceptual and design stage to a real, operational stage. The development team must first break down the application requirements into components and phases before creating a development strategy.

At this point, it is beneficial to involve members of all pertinent teams, including the ones for sales, product marketing, IT, and testing. This increases the likelihood that the final product will satisfy all specifications and be easy to use, test, and deploy.

Numerous different development methodologies may be implemented during this time. The most popular are sequential methods like the Waterfall technique or iterative ones like Agile development.

3. Testing and quality assurance

Testing and quality control phases commonly cross each other. Testers should begin setting up their test environments and test cases before the product is formally published. Additionally, while the application is being created, testers should be available to provide feedback. Unit and integration tests must also be included in programming jobs. Development teams typically employ continuous integration systems.

During the formal testing and quality assurance stage, testing experts must certify that the application satisfies the standards defined in the process's initial step. Throughout its existence, the app will need to meet all additional stakeholder expectations, therefore testers should keep an eye out for these as well. This stage also includes full integration testing, and the development team is free to address any problems or errors that are discovered and reported.

The development and testing phases end when the product meets a standard of quality and stability suitable for release. The marketing team for the product determines this level.

4. Deployment

Users are given access to the product during the deployment phase. This method varies based on the application type as each product type has a unique set of characteristics and criteria. For instance, software as a service (SaaS) apps must be installed on the organization's internal servers, whereas customers can use web apps through the internet.

5. Continuous maintenance and improvement of the product

The product goes through continual maintenance and development after deployment in order to maintain and monitor the effectiveness of the released application. The team organizes and prioritizes incoming upgrades while working to fix any bugs that are still present.

The maintenance phase of the application lifecycle management process is often the longest, but if the other stages went well, it might also need the least amount of work from the development team.

An essential part of the maintenance stage is picking a retirement date for the system. In other words, teams must choose whether to stop development and move to a newer iteration of the current product or to a totally new one.