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Is the mystery Borland suitor Serena?
Borland software is considering an offer from another company after a preliminary deal with MicroFocus. Is Serena the new company?
06/30/2009 01:55 PM EST

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Windows 7 pre-orders can make people money on eBay.
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Building on ALM


Application life-cycle management enables higher levels of efficiency

By Lisa L. Morgan
September 1, 2008 — 
Application life-cycle management is one of those broad industry terms that’s interpreted differently by different people because it lacks a single industry-standard definition. What’s driving ALM is a common set of pain points like a lack of visibility across tools and less-than-optimal integration—factors that negatively impact productivity. In today’s world of shrinking budgets, faster release cycles and greater software complexity, organizational cohesiveness is necessary to remain competitive. That means the time is ripe for ALM.

ALM is, after all, an evolutionary development that has been shaped by market forces. Software companies concede that development shops have exhausted too much time and too many resources trying to reconcile the differences inherent in point solutions, even those they offered themselves years ago. Over time, greater degrees of integration have been sought through product suites, middleware and “open” APIs, although not all vendors have been motivated to connect with others.

Given the real-world pressures of modern software development—lightning speed and unprecedented efficiency—it is not only ideal but necessary to achieve higher levels of integration that enable the sharing of project status and information across teams and departmental lines. ALM is essentially a supercharged superset of what has preceded it.

“ALM is really a combination of people, processes, tools and culture,” said Richard Riccetti, President and CEO of Seapine, a leading provider of ALM solutions.

“Life cycle” is the operative word as ALM is a cradle-to-grave concept that spans everything from requirements planning to deployment and monitoring. Some vendors focus on a subset of functions while others provide broader product suites intended to support a wider array of functions. Either way, there is a trend toward more and better integration with the supplier’s own tools and third-party products.

Not one of the software companies we’ve talked to claims to offer a complete ALM solution, and they say that no one currently does.

A single turnkey solution would be beside the point, they say, because the real goal is to enable visibility across processes at business and software development levels, increase the efficiency of workflow, and provide more effective means of communicating and collaborating throughout the software life cycle.

For example, Urbancode addresses requirements management, build management, configuration management, release management, testing/quality assurance (QA), deployment, monitoring and reporting, workflow, and collaboration, according to CEO Maciej Zawadzki. However, the company does not offer solutions for modeling and design. Instead, Urbancode focuses on what it does best and integrates with complementary third-party software configuration management (SCM) and testing tools, including Seapine’s automated testing tools, even though Urbancode provides some of the same functionality.

One of Urbancode’s more interesting features has to do with build management. Instead of creating new software artifacts based on the outcome of different testing stages, Urbancode maintains a common set of artifacts to which the various tests are applied. Zawadzki calls this a “living build” which provides more consistent visibility. It also allows for more productive cross-functional discussions because the data is correlated.

“ALM is like the CRM or ERP of software development and delivery because it provides traceability and visibility,” said Zawadzki. “Automation increases speed, but you really need to be able to share information to improve quality.”

Speaking of quality, it’s no surprise that Seapine labels its approach “quality-centric ALM.” Seapine was one of the first vendors to stress the importance of testing early and often.

“If you want high-quality code on time, you have to take an integrated approach to design, coding and testing,” said Seapine’s Riccetti. “ALM is a coupling of tools and processes—artifact management and communication among internal and external stakeholders.”

The idea is to provide a means of managing people, workloads and artifacts using a common repository that transcends departmental lines. In addition to being able to control changes to artifacts through version control, sandboxing and branching, ALM helps improve workflows by automating additional functions beyond testing and providing stakeholders with notifications of changes.

The higher levels of visibility benefit both team leaders and executives. Team leaders and managers are tasked with delivering projects on time and on budget, which means they need a reliable means of assigning and tracking tasks. Executives are concerned about the negative economic effects of poor software quality. Buggy software translates to poor customer satisfaction and less loyalty, which in turn affect top-line revenue and bottom-line profitability. ALM helps ensure tighter levels of control, providing both team leaders and executives with more effective tracing and tracking capabilities.

“Tools alone aren’t enough to ensure quality,” added Seapine’s Riccetti. “Quality must be a part of the culture, and it requires education. You have to have quality processes.”

At Seapine, quality is no longer synonymous with testing even though Seapine is best known for its long heritage of testing solutions. Today, “quality” extends to configuration, change management, release management, monitoring, reporting and workflow, in addition to testing and QA. Equally important is customer feedback because it’s the key to improving customer experience.

MKS is also providing visibility across disciplines and complicated workflows via a comprehensive platform that contemplates a broad range of processes within and throughout the application life cycle.

“We used to call ALM SCM, but today ALM is more than the sum of the parts,” said MKS chairman and CEO Philip Deck. “Today, you need an enterprise management system that spans diversity.”

One historic problem with cross-functional communication stems from the different types of tools used within an organization, tools that output different types of data, e.g., source code as opposed to spreadsheets or documents. MKS supports both software and non-software artifacts to enable higher levels of visibility and collaboration than would be possible otherwise.

“Software and non-software artifacts should be configured consistently because your source code needs to map to requirements and documents, and you want to maximize reuse,” said Deck. “We provide a single way to manage software and non-software artifacts throughout the life cycle.”

Rally Software is focusing on agility from both cultural and accelerated release perspectives.

“We focus on short, iterative development cycles,” said Richard Leavitt, vice president of product marketing at Rally.

Leavitt says “classic ALM” focused solely on software definition and development, as well as testing and acceptance with early team tools focusing on version control and bug tracking. Over time, it has become necessary to fold in project prioritization and scheduling as well as software hardening and release because Monday meetings just don’t cut it in an era when software development life cycles have shrunk from 18 months or two years to about two weeks.

Of course, software development doesn’t happen in a vacuum, which means the business case, deployment and support also have to be contemplated. As a result, Rally offers tools that support these capabilities as well, so the needs of the business and the software team can be addressed simultaneously.

“You need real-time visibility into work items, block and quality issues, and you need to be able to communicate if you’re going to coordinate efforts across teams,” Leavitt said. “When you’re working with smaller inventories that have fewer defects, you can develop better code faster and become more agile.”

Kovair is also taking a broad approach to ALM, which contemplates process methodology and control, integration with best of breed tools, and a total view of the development environment across multiple internal or outsourced locations.

According to Kovair CEO Bipin Shah, ALM is an ecosystem of integrated multi-vendor tools used by different groups independent of geography, organization, technology and function. It allows information to flow across tools through automated processes. The data is completely traceable, and it can be measured and viewed using consolidated reporting functions irrespective of the tool-origin.

“An ideal ALM environment should be capable of handling multiple releases and projects for different groups at different locations efficiently, and enable a collaboration irrespective of the different processes and methodologies that may be unique to each project or product,” said Shah. “To overcome this challenge, ALM tools have to be able to handle multiple process workflows simultaneously, have a Web-based architecture for collaboration between multiple locations and have the capabilities to handle the entire ecosystem of tools in an integrated manner.”

Kovair is a great example of a vendor that supports broad integration with third-party tools, as most development shops have already adopted point or partially integrated solutions. Kovair uses a Web-based architecture that is technology agnostic. Specifically, it’s using a SOA architecture and open APIs so customers can integrate tools with Kovair’s workflow engine. According to Shah, Kovair’s approach to ALM meets the requirements of ALM 2.0 as defined by Carey Schwaber of Forrester Research.

“Today we can truly deliver on all the aspects of ALM 2.0, including process, the total ecosystem of integrated tools, the global visibility and total reporting that management truly demands from the development organizations,” said Shah.

By contrast, the historical reality is that organizations tend to choose one tool a time that suits a particular group or department, even though such an approach does not serve the entire organization over the long term. Shah says these organizations need to ask fewer questions about tools and more questions about the process and creation of an entire ecosystem for applications development and management, without getting bogged down choosing one tool at a time.

Despite the different approaches to ALM, the above vendors agree that ALM’s greatest benefits are unprecedented levels of visibility, higher levels of productivity and more efficient collaboration—all of which result in higher quality code and faster release cycles.

“ALM is the next evolution in integration,” said Seapine’s Riccetti. “In the old days we had discrete tools for defect racking and source control, but today integration creates a foundation for automation that results in greater efficiency.”

But again, the success of ALM does not depend solely on tools. It requires a more integral approach to workflows, inter- and intra-departmental communications, software development, and overall business efficiency. Toward that end, Seapine and others are expanding their product sets and interfacing to more third-party solutions. In addition, some offer a full range of services that are designed to help customers become more competitive.

For example, Seapine offers a “Quality Ready Assessment” that provides a competitive view of internal practices, so organizations can understand where they’re falling short. The assessment often reveals that individuals within an organization view quality differently which translates to competitive disadvantages.

“Quality is cultural, which is why we’re providing a more holistic approach,” said Seapine’s Riccetti. “Tools alone won’t help you deliver on time or on budget, or achieve high levels of customer satisfaction.”

Lisa Morgan is an independent management and marketing consultant who writes about critical business and technology issues. She has been a contributing editor to SD Times since 2000.


Related Search Term(s): ALM, Kovair, Seapine


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