Application lifecycle management’s rise fuels user debate and product changes
March 29th, 2010 | Jan StaffordFew software development professionals will argue that managing an application from requirements through deployment is a bad idea. Bring up the term application lifecycle management (ALM), however, and software pros will start arguing about what it is, who owns the marketplace and whether end-to-end software suites do a better job than smaller, less expensive tools.
In short, ALM is a practice that manages an application from initial planning through its retirement, encompassing everything from development/test lifecycle to requirements and architecture to portfolio management and operations. Adopting the practice wholeheartedly requires great changes in development and IT organizations. Before ALM and in companies that don’t practice ALM, the development team’s role ends as soon as an application goes live. In ALM, however, project management, quality assurance management and testing are no longer relegated only to the development phase.
Four vendors — IBM, HP, MKS and Microsoft - do dominate the ALM market today, according to analysts from Butler Group, voke and others. SearchSoftwareQuality’s latest reader survey affirms that analysis; but it also shows that software organizations are using ALM products from many players, most of which offer tools only for certain aspects of ALM. Survey respondents definitely cited the ALM big four, but about 40% use tools from CA, Thoughtworks Studio, Rally Software, VersionOne and a number of open source tools.
All vendors are beefing up their ALM lines, either by acquisition - such as CollabNet’s recent acquisition of Danube - or bolstering functionality. A recent spurt of activity has centered on making products’ ALM features usable in Agile, a development methodology being adopted widely today. Rally Software and VersionOne are among the ALM vendors in that camp, and IBM and Microsoft are also among those expected to extend their ALM platforms to Agile-friendliness. Agile development requires different ALM functionality because it changes the way applications are delivered - in short iterations rather than other methods’ longer delivery times - and how frequently the application is updated.
Agile users surveyed and interviewed by SearchSoftwareQuality are chief among those who shy away from cradle-to-grave, product-focused application lifecycle management. One reason is that the end-to-end solution flies in the face of Agile itself, which focuses on lean development and computing. In this group are those who use such management approaches as wikis, or editable web pages, and tree structures for version control. Also, some companies create their own ALM solutions, self-integrating tools like Hudson, Subversion and Jira.
Naturally, there are software pros who think end-to-end, automated solutions and processes are the right choice, particularly for large projects and organizations. Using wikis will work only on small projects and in small organizations, some say. Also, in their view, point solutions give an entry into full application management, but as applications and organizations scale, the point tools won’t work well. For these software managers, scalability is a critical purchasing decision issue because ALM tends to snowballs in companies that adopt it. It’s common to see ALM-based organizations expanding the practice, bringing in business analysts, operations and other internal groups.
Increasing use of cloud and virtualization technologies in application development and management will make the ALM product market even more crowded. Already, vendors are coming to market with lighter-weight, SaaS-based ALM products, such as Qmetry’s test management platform; and TOMOS Software’s lightweight ALM product.
Obviously, a market in which users are divided about approaches and new platforms are emerging is ripe for creation of innovative products. Expect to see more products that fill in the gap between the just-enough ALM and cradle-to-grave ALM in the near future.
