Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

The principles of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) are integral to mature development disciplines. Experienced development organizations employ these principles to ensure quality in the products they develop. Scoutwest, Inc. fully supports ALM in its products, Standard Issue® and Standard Time®. Here is what ALM means to us.

Application Lifecycle Management
        Project management
        Project tracking
        Requirements planning
        Design and development
        Quality Assurance
        Release management

Project management
A certain degree of management overhead will benefit any development effort. Time spent thinking through, and documenting a project, will be regained in the increased efficiency it yields. Project planning involves asking the questions: who, when, and what. Both Standard Issue® and Standard Time® help with planning requirements, resources, and schedules. Projects are often broken down into phases such as, Requirements gathering, Research, Design, Development, Release. Early phases are strategic, while later phases are more tactical. Planning in early stages benefits later tactical activities.

Project tracking
Does your organization really know how long to expect for each project phase? Do you have pressures that demand results in time, quality, or budget? Do you know the optimal mix of time for each phase that guarantees acceptable quality within your budget of time and capital? This knowledge comes from experience and tracking actual metrics. Do you have technical instruments to help you measure these metrics? Project tracking is the microscope of the product development trade. It magnifies the details that make your product profitable.

Requirements planning
Feature requirements and version releases are delicate issues. The fragile balance of meeting customer needs in each product release is important, and must be managed closely. Releasing products without proper requirements is like attempting to hit a moving target. Your developers will aim happily at each moving target until a critical mass realizes what is happening. They'll lose faith in management because they'll know that the requirements were not planned properly. During that time, you'll lose time and miss critical market windows. There are simple tools to help in this process. Use them.

Design and development
With a good design, development should be as much like manufacturing as possible. The development phase is greatly simplified because the proper amount of planning was done. However, humans are not infallible. Even the best designs leave the development phase with a certain number of unknowns. These unknowns must be worked out during the development phase. The act of redesigning during development is known as thrash, and should be kept to a minimum. Measure twice, cut once.

Quality Assurance
It is wise to have procedures for routing defects through the QA team to ensure that each issue is addressed, and nothing is swept under the rug. The QA team should triage and prioritize issues for development. When hundreds, or even thousands of issues must be managed, it is a lot less painful to use a tool designed for the job.

Release management
After the initial release of a product is complete, you have the burden of ensuing that each subsequent release also meets customer needs while efficiently utilizing development resources. Again, this is a delicate balance. Development indicates the duration of time that each feature may take. Management can use this to stack up features for each release, and maintain critical release windows. Proper resource allocation to meet these windows is the trick.

How Standard Issue® and Standard Time® can help
Standard Issue® and Standard Time® are designed as one-stop solutions for managing Application Lifecycle Management processes. The products do not force a rigid methodology onto your organization, and may be configured to meet your existing processes. They are designed for simplicity so that employees enjoy using them. This ensures that your organization gets more data, and more accurate data. Standard Issue® manages requirements gathering, defect and issue management, release management, and quality assurance testing. Standard Time® manages project planning, project tracking, and time and expense tracking. If your management and development organization is weak in these areas, you should begin to formalize and improve your processes. The time you spend learning these disciplines will help your organization, and help your career.

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