Thursday, February 18, 2010

ALM Boundaries are Expanding in Application Development

While the pool of application lifecycle management (ALM) vendors tends to be dominated by four big swimmers -- IBM, HP, MKS and Microsoft -- it's a crowded space, with many players offering pieces of the solution. But the next wave is making the pool itself deeper, as the definition of "lifecycle" broadens, encompassing not only the development/test lifecycle, but requirements and architecture, portfolio management and operations.

"People are beginning to see a broader lifecycle of the application," said Mark Sarbiewski, senior director of products and solutions marketing, HP Software & Solutions. "For a while everyone focused on the SDLC [software development lifecycle], then you go live and it's somebody else's problem." ALM, he said, "needs to happen upstream through the full life of the application and ultimately until you retire it."

Agile development is also broadening the definition of ALM, he said. "When you change the way you deliver, when you change how often software is delivered, how frequently you touch the application, and who's involved in the business -- those are some of big points—clearly that touches automation. So how do you automate not just testing but deployment, monitoring and change in production?"

Click here for complete article by SearchSoftwareQuality
by Colleen Frye of SearchSoftwareQuality