The onset of complexities in the application lifecycle and the eagerness to bring new products faster into the market calls for constant innovation that abides by the stringent regulatory compliance. This growing complexity paved the way for multiple tools and software solutions to manage the increasing complexity of application lifecycle. To stay ahead in the market organisations keep upgrading their development tools in search of the software ecosystem that best fit their purpose. As a result, the various roles, areas or department of application development start using their own tools, creating functional silos. These isolated tools fail to provide any synchronisation of data from one tool with the other and lack effective integration mechanism in their tool setup.
Managing increasing complexity and harmonizing the work of various department calls for the integration of these tools. Point-to-point integration of separate models is not enough to breakdown functional silos. Integrated ALM solutions allow organisations to collaborate, streamline and automate product development processes, reduce time and cost and increase product quality while maintaining compliance with quality standards. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) offers the capacity to integrate, coordinate and manage all the different phases of an application development process encompassing requirement management, project management, software design and development, Quality Assurance & Testing Services, configuration management and much more.
What are the benefits of Integrated Application Lifecycle Management?
Gain a better understanding
Keeping track of the day to day activities of an application development project is a big trouble. All stakeholders including Tester, Developer, Project Manager work in a secluded manner using different tools and limited knowledge about the application development status.
To have real-time visibility into project status and progress, it is pertinent for all the stakeholders to stay connected. Integrated ALM tools unlock the hidden data and enable all the project stakeholders to get real-time updates on project reports and development through an integrated web-based unified platform thus helping them do their job much efficiently.
Effective collaboration among stakeholders
The organisation needs to form an effective collaboration between various functional teams including project manager, testers, developer by integrating numerous development tools and processes that best fit their requirements. Integrated ALM tools ensure that all stakeholders are aligned and connected through an integrated dashboard that enables real-time tracking among teams about project development and the task assigned to the teams.
Increase productivity and faster time to deliver
An integrated ALM tool brings in several opportunities to increase the productivity of all stakeholders and teams involved in several ways.
Manage changes effectively
Managing all stakeholders with the latest change in application lifecycle development and ensuring smooth application of these changes in a big challenge for organisations. Use of different tools among any discipline could lead to wasted efforts, delivery defects and lot more. The organisation needs a connected set of lifecycle tools to ensure the development teams can capture, manage and track the status of proposed changes in various phases of the lifecycle.
Successful management of Risk
Managing and tracking issues and fixing bugs that emerge during the application lifecycle is a critical task. Holistic ALM tools help teams to track and manage risks in parallel during the development of the application lifecycle. Integrated ALM tool also helps to identify, capture, analyse and mitigate risk early in the project lifecycle to ensure better quality in the production environment.
Improve quality
Integrating ALM tools improve the quality of a software product by reducing the number of errors caused by communication gap among stakeholders, inconsistencies between requirements, enabling robust testing, and identifying the gap between needs and expectations of users. Integration ensures that the quality of the work is validated at every state and defects are identified at the early stages of the process. Integration also ensures that the code quality and performance throughout the lifecycle processes is up to the mark.
End-to-End lifecycle traceability
Integrated ALM traces the relationship between all components to facilitate alignment with changes at any stage of the application lifecycle. Its flexible reporting features also provide traceability in a different way to fulfil the needs of different roles. It also drives collaboration between different stakeholders and forms the base of regulatory compliance.
Real-time insights in quality and development
The integrated dashboard gives a 360-degree overview of the project, productivity and quality delivering actionable insights. It ensures every team member knows about any of the changes are made during the development process and there is no last-minute surprise causing delivery delays or project failure. The information is delivered at a granular level, from coding and testing to risk management and aligning to requirements. These insights help in decision making and managing resources efficiently.
Integration – The future of ALM
In this highly competitive environment, improving the effectiveness of an organisation and speeding product launch cycle is critical to success. Businesses are increasingly looking to scale up in the market and make the most out of their investment. To increase the return on investment, the processes and tools for managing the application lifecycle need integration. Integrated ALM tool brings the best of the existing product lifecycle and integrates them into a strong process to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the businesses.
Conclusion
MicroGenesis is a leading solutions provider of holistic Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with over 20+ years of experience in handling various ALM applications. We are partnered with leading ALM based OEM’s to deliver the best ALM solutions to our customers. Our team with its expertise and knowledge has served multiple clients across various geographies and culture and has helped them scale-up in the market.
