| | SEPTEMBER 201619CIOReviewThe most important benefit of an ALM solution is coordinating the people, processes, information, and tools involved in a project to deliver innovation to your stakeholdersprovides the backlog management, communication and reporting capabilities that are necessary in order to truly realize the promise of Agile.ALM systems make it easy to automate and track everything that happens from the time the need for a change arises until the time the so-lution is delivered to the end users while reducing administrative bur-dens on developers. Users have an easy way to enter requests and de-velopers have a powerful way to re-view and work with those requests. At every stage of the process, noti-fications are sent out regarding as-signments and all activity is tracked. With an ALM System in place, de-velopers can focus on supporting the business with high quality solutions.Over the past decade the key thing I've learned is that in software delivery there is no single source of artifacts. Regardless of the software delivery process -- Agile or other methodology -- processes need to work across a variety of tools and be implemented on top of those tools.We need to break through those tool and process silos in order for the next generation of software lifecycle implementation to become more about collaboration and communi-cation -- anchored by the code and other artifacts that we are creating in the process.With these lessons in mind, to get started scaling your Agile and DevOps transformation consider the following steps: Define your end-to-end software lifecycle architecture. This can take a DevOps centric view if you are focused on continuous integration and deployment. Or a more Agile centric point of view if you are focused on the project and team side of things. Either way, create a diagram that highlights how value flows from business idea to functioning software, and all of the stakeholders involved. Define the concrete tools that will support those teams and interactions. The reality is that each one of the stakeholders will live in their tool of choice, be that an issue track and source repository. Define the connections between the teams and tools rather they being in silos & falling out here & there.To summarize, Application life-cycle management (ALM) should-not enforce existing IT and software delivery environments as an over-head but should act as facilitator; the idea is to integrate as many tools and processes as possible into a uni-fied workflow which helps improv-ing efficiency and delivering quality in sort time in a cost effective with transparency at all levels. The ALM journey will keep continuing for-ward, and, as technical and process trends come and go, the core princi-ples are perhaps more relevant than ever with the ever increasing com-petitive digital landscape.
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