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Mea culpa, ALM toolmakers say


By Jennifer deJong
April 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 4)
They admit it: early ALM suites never really delivered.
Now, aiming to make good on earlier unmet promises, ALM toolmakers are offering a new vision of application life-cycle management. In an about face, toolmakers are de-emphasizing the importance of a single set of tools from one provider. They say the new ALM focuses instead on the process and information that connects those tools—and on moving businesses a step closer to the elusive goal of delivering better applications, faster.

Essentially sets of tools encompassing requirement management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, release management and more, early ALM offerings were promoted as the unified approach to the entire life cycle. At any time, analysts, coders, testers and other participants in the application development process could see what others were doing, and where a project stood—or so the vision went. Which requirements have been coded, tested and released? Which are still works in progress?

That was the vision, but in reality, answers to those questions were hard to come by, and the notion that the right hand always knew what the left hand was doing was greatly oversold. “We haven’t delivered on the unified vision, and we are all equally guilty of selling it,” said Rick Jackson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for ALM toolmaker Borland.

Early ALM suites were made up of siloed tools, which offered only limited ability to share data, said IBM Rational director of offerings management Ashok Reddy. “The integrations were fragile.” Connections among the tools in ALM suites were little more than point-to-point links, he said. “The tools need to fit the way people want to work, not the other way around,” added Cliff Utstein, vice president of marketing for software configuration management toolmaker AccuRev.

A key reason why integrations among tools were limited is that many ALM toolmakers built their suites by buying companies to fill in the tool gaps, said Reddy, referring to IBM’s 2003 purchase of Rational Software, among other acquisitions. [see box] A complete set of tools in hand, they set out to enable the disparate offerings to work together. But because each tool defined the concept of a project differently, it was difficult to do much more than just share data, said Reddy. “Some tools see a project is a set of assets. Some define it as a set of code.”

 Related Search Term(s): ALM

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