Application Lifecycle Management – or ALM – comprises several disciplines and practices that substantially improve the quality of developed software, as well as the time employed on that development.

Achieving success in a development project greatly depends on the attention paid to its lifecycle. A good ALM strategy will allow you to answer affirmatively all these questions:

• • Do you have a detailed overview of the situation of your projects?
• • Are your team members aware of the most important requisites to ensure the success of the project?
• • Are you capable of handling changes in the development process with a minimal impact?
• • Can you unequivocally and immediately obtain the source code of any version of your application?
• • Can you work easily work simultaneously and in parallel over different versions of the same application?
• • Are defects detected in the earliest phases of your developments?
• • Can you immediately deliver a functional version of the software you are developing?
• • Can you quickly comprehend the effects of changes performed on the source code?
• • Can your team work in an agile and efficient manner, with tools that cover every necessity?
• • Can you fully trace your project, from requisites to implementation?

ALM proposes an explicit management of a set of areas that are crucial to the successful implementation of the project, but which usually don’t gather enough attention or are not carried out with the appropriate knowledge or tools, including:

• • Methodology and process
• • Prerequisite and change management
• • Configuration management
• • Architecture and design
• • User experience (UX)
• • Source code quality and development good-practices
• • Quality and test assurance
• • Traceability
• • Delivery management