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So, should I care about ALM?

I’ve recently returned from presenting at the Visual Studio Team System Inner Circle Airlift in Redmond where representatives from more than 150 Microsoft partners from around the world gathered together to consider the benefits of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and ‘value-up’ software development.

The more I spoke to delegates at the event, the more it became evident that they had fully taken on board the ideas behind ALM. The more this became clear, the more I wondered whether this was happening in the wider IT community. After all, for the last couple of years I have generally been greeted by blank faces when I’ve talked about ALM to delegates attending training events in the UK and across Europe.

So, what is ALM?

Definitions abound! My favourite is “the coordination of development lifecycle activities, including requirements, modelling, development, build, and testing, through enforcement of processes, management of relationships and reporting on progress”. These sound worthy enough ideals which, if we could achieve them, might help us deliver software with better business value for our project stakeholders. Add to this the fact that Microsoft sees ALM as much, much more so that it goes beyond the SDLC and includes IT governance, infrastructure management and operations/support and I think we can start to see the scale of ALM as a discipline.

Put simply, ALM coordinates all the activities involved between identifying the need for and successfully operating software that provides business value.

So, what are the benefits of ALM?

This is a much easier question to answer.  The traceability, enforcement of process and project visibility required within ALM provides tangible benefits such as:

• increased ROI
• increased accountability
• stricter compliance to governance initiatives
• increased collaboration between business and IT
• improved project management
• improved quality
• shorter development lifecycles
• increased responsiveness to business needs

So, should I care about ALM?

Given the answers to earlier questions, I think the answer is yes – and it doesn’t matter who you are in your organisation – a business analyst, systems architect, UI designer, DBA, developer, tester, project manager, operations manager or even the CIO – there are benefits to adopting the ideas behind ALM in all areas of your business.

So, what’s next?

In my next blog entry I will will look at how Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) supports the ideas in ALM and I will explain how and why VSTS helps to manage the traceability, enforcement of process and project visibility that I mentioned earlier.