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HOME >> OPINIONS

A team-first approach to ALM

By Carl Zetie

October 11, 2011 — (Page 1 of 3)
Carl Zetie

Whether your favorite application life-cycle management tools come from commercial vendors, open-source projects, in-house development, or some mixture of all of these, it’s no secret that promoting collaboration across life-cycle tools, from requirements to development to test to build, has remained stubbornly difficult. Integrations can be complex to build, expensive to maintain, and frequently broken by tool upgrades. It’s easy to complain about tool integration, much harder to propose improvements; but there is a new approach to tool integration called Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) that may provide the answer.

Integrating life-cycle tools has a long history. The most common approach has been to build pairwise integrations between tools, and while this is workable for a small number of integrations, the number of combinations can quickly grow unmanageably large. Version incompatibilities can also create an upgrade nightmare, often solvable only by relying on tools from a single vendor and its closest partners.

In reaction to this tangle, some vendors have attempted to build single repository solutions, with all the tools integrated around a common store. However, this limits development teams to tools integrated with the repository, which severely limits choice. This “Big Bang” upgrade simultaneously replaces every tool, migrates existing data, and recreates business processes and governance rules required to adopt the single repository. As you can tell, this is impractical for any team already invested in existing tools.

Other approaches depend on collaboration among committees of vendors, users and academics. For example, there have been attempts over the years to define a uniform meta-model for ALM assets, in the hope that this would at least facilitate the importation and exportation of assets between tools. Of course, getting so many interested parties, each with its own favored tools, to agree is, to put it politely, challenging, and the market often moves too fast for the standards setters to keep pace. Similarly, attempts to get competing vendors to integrate by standardizing around a common implementation framework stumble over the need for each vendor to protect its own investment.

Related Search Term(s): ALM, OSLC

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