Why incorporate ALM processes into Sitecore implementations
By: Sitecore MVP Jason St-Cyr
Following our introduction to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), we look at how you can start small by incorporating the processes into your Sitecore implementations.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) allows us to do what we do faster, better and in a way that is more easily replicated, as you know if you checked out our introduction to ALM. Sound like an ideal concept that we can all get behind, wouldn’t you say?
Not sold yet?
We get it. Even though folks have been talking about the importance of ALM to organizations for years, the majority aren’t planning for it, nor do they have a vision of how to get their team to where they need to be. Proper ALM strategy and implementation isn’t something that happens overnight; it success depends on employees across the board: portfolio and program management, architects, designers, testers, developers, and of course, operations staff. In a large organization, putting together a solid plan for ALM within the enterprise can be quite daunting.
All that to say that, while full implementation will be a challenge, small changes are a great way to get started. Your Sitecore implementation gives you an excellent opportunity to start introducing processes that you may not have already in place.
Next comes the inevitable question: What about the bottom line?
Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
We’re happy to tell you that, generally speaking, the benefits of ALM outweigh the cost:
- Increased ROI by delivering more often will enable you to start getting business value from your investment faster
- Better traceability by using tooling to tie together all stages of the application lifecycle
- More efficient delivery by planning for smaller batches and involving more members of the team.
- Improved quality through automated testing and regression, and tester involvement earlier in the process.
- Increased flexibility through task automation and early failure.
- Enhanced collaboration by bringing teams together throughout the lifecycle.
Applying ALM to Sitecore
For Sitecore implementations specifically, this means you are likely targeting the following improvements in your process:
- Requirements tracking: Ensuring requirements for your build are available to the team is crucial to making sure your implementation is done efficiently.
- Task planning: Team members should be able to tie the tasks they need to accomplish with the requirements that have been defined, as well as track and report on progress for the implementation. Don’t forget the dashboard for management!
- Source control strategy: We beg of you, please put your code in source control. “It works on my machine” does not make for a successful and repeatable implementation.
- Automated Builds: If you have multiple team members working on the implementation, you should be considering continuous builds and continuous integration to verify checkins made by the team. Or you could just hope it all compiles together… (we don’t recommend this approach!)
- Automated Deployments: You will try to deploy your solution manually for a while, but when you want to be delivering often, it becomes very annoying to be constantly creating builds and packages and installing them by hand. Look at tools like TeamCity or TFS to get your build processes flowing, and then tie into release management tools like OctoDeploy or InRelease to push it out. If you can leverage tools like Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) you can push your content as well!
How have you and your organization incorporated ALM into your Sitecore implementations?
