10 Best ALM Tools For 2022

The landscape of ALM tools is shifting beneath our feet.

Why?

Because the discipline of ALM, or Application Lifecycle Management, is undergoing a shift — IoT is blooming, and the line between physical products and software has already begun to blur.

Many organizations are finding that they need to update, integrate, or reconsider the Application Lifecycle Management tools they’re using in order set up a system that truly supports the nature of their lifecycle (whether it’s hardware, software, or something in between — I’ll get to that later).

In this review, I provide a brief ALM definition and explain what ALM tools are — what they do, what benefits they provide, and what a good ALM tool should offer. I’ve included a detailed breakdown of some of the top ALM software on the market (including their features, main pros and cons, integrations, pricing, and an overall quality score). Finally, I describe the main points you should consider when choosing an ALM tool for your organization.

First, What Is ALM?

Easy question, not such an easy answer.

To start, the Application Lifecycle Management Body of Knowledge (ALMBOK) gives a basic ALM meaning:

“ALM defines how a software application is managed from conception, through its creation and deployment, to its eventual retirement.”

In practice, ALM isn’t quite as cut and dry.

The line between software and hardware (including physical products) is blurring with the growth of IoT. The once-separate disciplines of ALM, which is largely concerned with software lifecycle management, and PLM, which is concerned with physical product lifecycle management, are converging. Many industry experts predict that within a few years we’ll simply call it Enterprise LIfecycle Management, or ELM.

That said, ALM is a broad term that ecompasses many disciplines. To illustrate my point, here’s a list of disciplines that fall under the ALM umbrella or have some overlap with ALM:

• Business Case Development
• Project Management
• Assets Management
• Security Management
• License Management
• Change Management
• Release Management
• Requirements Management
• Development
• Quality Assurance
• Customer Support
• IT Service Delivery
• Software Testing
• Portfolio Management (Project, Application, etc)
• Business Process Management
• Knowledge Management
• Compliance
• Architecture (IT, Solution, Infra, Software)

The list could probably be longer, but it’s more useful to distill it down to something concrete for our purposes.

A Simple Definition Of ALM

In general, a simple way to look at ALM is this: ALM is the marriage between software engineering and business management. Looking at it through this simplified lens gives us a clearer focus when it comes to evaluating the best ALM software — which is what I cover in the next section.

What Are ALM Tools, And What Do They Do?

Unlike standalone software developing tools or agile planning tools which by and large serve the same purpose for anyone using it, ALM tools have to merge a number of disciplines under the same roof.

For that reason, ALM tools are generally sold as software suites with several modules or components. These can be integrated to provide a standardized environment that supports your organization through all of the phases of the software development lifecycle (from concept through deployment and eventual retirement), in addition to supplying business management and software engineering tools for the functions listed in the previous section.

The people using an ALM tool across an organization will be using it for very different purposes, performing different functions to achieve different goals. Because of this, it’s unlikely that you’ll find an ALM solution offering absolutely everything you need right out of the box. Even so, using an ALM software has many advantages, which I describe below.

What Are The Main Benefits Of ALM Software?

ALM tools serve many functions — here are some of the main benefits you can derive from implementing an ALM solution:

• Standardized environment for collaboration between departments, integrating sw development tools with various management tools
• Automation and streamlining of the software dev process
• Enhanced clarity and simplicity for complex processes
• Improved software quality
• Reduction of costs
• Reduction of time to market
• Enhanced compliance audits (especially important for safety-critical industries)

Of course, to get these benefits, you have to make sure you’re choosing a tool that genuinely serves your use case, otherwise you run the risk of it becoming a waste of money and space as “shelfware”. See below for criteria to help you choose the right tool.

Keep reading on: https://thedigitalprojectmanager.com/alm-tools/.

Originally published at www.thedigitalprojectmanager.com on February 25, 2019.