Application Lifecycle Management: What and Why?
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, documentation, review, testing, tracking, and release management.
How can software development teams benefit from Application Lifecycle Management?
- Schedule, cost and quality status become visible in real time. Management teams are aware in earlier stages and are therefore able to mitigate potential risks.
- Puts the software development lifecycle process under enforced control. PM and SQA are empowered to see the true data and are able to control key development activities. Quality violation activities are automatically prevented based on software development process or qualtiy policy.
- Quantitative measurement presents risk analysis and situation comparison between current and historical projects. Risks become apparent beforehand and historical metrics provide a basis to determine if progess is better or worse.
- Fine tuning your Application Lifecycle Management system will make an enhancement once and for all, satisfying Digital Six Sigma.
| Schedule | Cost | Quality | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visible | Plan and tracking status are visible. | Cost is calculated and monitored. | Know actual quality status with ease. |
| Controllable | Potential and actual schedule risk can be mitigated or removed at earlier stage. | Cost is under control and can be leveraged per real situation. | Control on release, review build, etc. Prevent activities of quality rule violation. |
| Measurable | Know if you are doing better or worse. | Know if you are costing more or less. | Know if your quality policy works or not. |
| Improvable | Improvement based on Application Lifecycle Management system will come up with more on time delivery, cost reduction, and quality enhancement once and for all. | ||
Application Lifecycle Management and Easy! Software Products
Our products provide an integrated Application Lifecycle Management solution. The combined functionalities of the products and add-on modules are capable of covering all aspects needed in a software development life cycle or software developoment process. Please refer to the diagram in the left side navigation bar.
Easy!Flow™ is an all-in-one, Application Lifecycle Management software system. It provides software development life cycle management software facilities and functionalities. Rather than putting many seperate pieces of software together, Easy!Flow provides an integrated system. Easy!Flow provides users all that is needed in the Application Lifecycle Management process. Due to the tight integration, users will be capable of fine-grained process control, allowing them to achieve stable quality with improved efficiency and productivity.
Easy!Flow™ integrates add-on modules to extend its functionality. Currently the add-on modules provided are: EZ!PM, EZ!Review, and EZ!SVN.
With the extention add-on modules, Easy!Flow™ seamlessly integrates project management, change management, issue tracking, software configuration management (SCM), document control and management, peer code review, and quality assurance functions into a team-oriented collaboration life cycle management software. Above all, it offers the flexibility for a project team to configure a software development process that meets its needs and for individuals to customize personal preferences that increase personal productivity. For more details, watch the demo video located in the left side navigation bar.
EZ!PM is a project management add-on module which is seamlessly integrated into the Easy!Flow™ Application Lifecycle Management solution. It provides an interactive gantt chart which is easy to use. The project tasks can be further broken down into working items (tickets). The risk assessment functionality will automatically detect potential schedule risks. Additionally, task completion percentage can be automatically calculated.
EZ!Review is an integrated peer code review add-on module of the Easy!Flow Application Lifecycle Management solution. The code review package can be generated automatically. Review comments and status are managed in line, at file or package levels. Review can be enforced automatically per release management policy.
EZ!SVN is an integrated source control add-on module that is seamlessly integrated into the Application Lifecycle Management system of Easy!Flow™. It works as an Eclipse-Subversion plugin or as a stand alone application. Source code is tightly controlled per release management policy. Source code integration means better control and improved efficiency due to the fine-grained release control and management.
EZ!TTS™ is a FREE defect or issue tracker which contains defect/issue tracking and corresponding query and report functions. It is a functional subset of the Easy!Flow system. All the fields in the tracking ticket are customizable.
Easy!LoadTest™ is a test automation tool, which focuses on performance or load test for all kinds of web based applications. It can automatically record and run test scenarios at predefined stress while monitoring traffic and server and database performance parameters. Easy!LoadTest™ can perform additional, customiable verification checks of server responses. It supports the following web technologies AJAX, ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
