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Integration's the New Face of ALM


By Jeff Feinman
December 26, 2007 — 
Application life-cycle management has undergone an intriguing change of focus in the past year as companies have begun to adopt a much more open approach to their ALM concepts.

Until now, most companies in the ALM market have tried to offer a full ALM catalog, gathering up outside tools through acquisitions with the aim of stringing together a full ALM suite, from requirements gathering straight through to deployment. One of the major criticisms of “acquisition ALM” was that tools picked up in this fashion lacked integration.

However, as somewhat of an evolution from that problem, a number of companies have begun to roll out the integration capabilities themselves, offering open platforms that are not vendor-specific.

One of the companies leading this trend is CollabNet, which has touted its ability to get development teams started on process-based ALM. With the release of CollabNet Enterprise Edition 5.0 in September, the company made a push into the ALM market, allowing an organization’s process and design goals to be customized through wiki-style editors. Company officials have also pointed out that CollabNet is an open framework into which third-party tools can be integrated.

Earlier in the year, Borland Software introduced its Open ALM concept, a means to offer customers the ability to use any combination of life-cycle tools, whether commercial or open source. As part of its Open ALM strategy, the company released Gauntlet, a build and test automation system that can work with any type of version control system and isolate data defects until they can be fixed. Borland officials said that the company will continue to evolve its existing products into an open architecture based on open standards that will allow third-party tools to thrive.

Another company that has carried a more open ALM approach is Kovair Software, whose Omnibus Integration Bus for IT can integrate disparate ALM tools from different makers. The Omnibus Integration Bus serves as a linking tool between different aspects of the application life cycle, including requirements management, project and portfolio management, and change management. The main benefit of the tool, according to Kovair officials, is the ability to drastically reduce the number of integrations necessary among individual tools.

‘ALM 2.0’
2007 was also the year that Carey Schwaber, an analyst with Forrester Research, coined the term “ALM 2.0” to reflect the trend swaying toward single-repository solutions and away from individual tools for each life-cycle phase. She said the new options are more appealing to software developers.

“To get ALM from IBM today, you need to buy all the tools and then the services to tie them all together. That’s much more costly than turning on CollabNet tomorrow,” she said.

Elsewhere in the ALM market, MKS added the ability to reuse requirements in MKS Integrity 2007, its flagship ALM platform. Perforce Software released an SDK for the Perforce Defect Tracking Gateway, which gives users a way to develop new plug-ins that can implement customized ALM solutions. Seapine Software, meanwhile, added Windows Vista compatibility to its QA Wizard Pro tool and a new folder system that allows developers to organize test cases and test runs in TestTrack Studio 2008. Serena Software focused on business mashups with the release of Mashup Composer and Mashup Server.


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