In today's working environment, the idea of process in ALM is very important, according to Sky Basu, CTO and president of Kovair. With more stakeholders and distributed teams nowadays, developers need to have a firm process in place.
"In the older days, ALM usually consisted of a very small team and, in most of the cases, process wasn't necessary or was manually implemented," Basu said. "But now, as teams become very diverse and much larger, process is absolutley necessary. Not only that, if you try to implement that process manually, it becomes very difficult and because of the challenge in enforcing a manual process, it will fade."
Basu added that one of the challenges with today's global teams is sharing data. For example, a customer should have access to requirements created by the developer in order to view and comment on them. Sharing requirements through e-mail or Microsoft Word can be a "nightmare" because every time a requirement changes, the entire document must be updated. Online access to these requirements for the proper shareholders is the best way to share this data, Basu said.