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Definition

What is application lifecycle management?

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the process of managing a software lifecycle from creation to its end of life. By combining and organizing the elements of an application's lifecycle, ALM improves product quality, optimizes productivity and eases the management and maintenance burden for related products and services.

ALM itself consists of an integrated system of people, tools and processes that supervise a software application from its initial planning and development, through testing and maintenance, to eventual decommissioning and retirement. The process provides a software development framework while helping organizations manage their software over its lifecycle.

Application lifecycle management tools automate software development and deployment processes, help ensure compliance is achieved and maintained, and create a standardized environment where all teams involved in the application lifecycle can communicate and collaborate.

Why is application lifecycle management important?

ALM provides organizations with a structured approach to managing software development. It ensures that appropriate project requirements are set as well as met, and it helps developers adjust development processes and goals during the software lifecycle.

In addition, by ensuring that all teams -- including development, operations and security -- collaborate effectively, organizations are better positioned to produce the best possible software.

Application lifecycle management helps businesses achieve high efficiency and gain a competitive edge by accelerating workflows and ensuring that top-quality products get deployed.

What is application lifecycle management used for?

ALM provides a framework for setting requirements and establishing processes, governance and methodologies before deploying software. In essence, it supplies the scaffolding within which software gets developed, tested and maintained.

By design, it also includes safeguards and checkoffs to ensure software meets compliance, governance, efficiency, usability, performance and other benchmarks before being released into production. Finally, ALM provides ongoing opportunities to review and adjust costs to meet changing budget requirements and productivity assessments, ensuring that companies realize their return on investment objectives for software development.

What is the application lifecycle management process?

The ALM process gives DevSecOps teams, plus executive staff and stakeholders, ongoing opportunities to do the following:

  • Set and manage requirements as well as establish processes and procedures.
  • Set and manage governance and compliance needs across the lifecycle.
  • Establish methodologies to manage and control development, testing and maintenance activities.
  • Ensure that testing meets functionality, performance, usability and security needs.

As explained in the next section, the ALM process explicitly establishes and manages all aspects of all application lifecycle management stages.

Stages of application lifecycle management

Application lifecycle management consists of five stages:

1. Defining requirements

When defining requirements, all stakeholders gather to declare what they need from the application to support their business cases. A design of the application is created based on their expressed needs. Requirements can include a range of factors, including the business needs of the stakeholders as well as compliance and governance requirements.

Specifying requirements usually happens top-down, meaning the needs start with the most general and move into the more specific and detailed. As a result, case requirements are often in a hierarchical tree structure, with each node representing a more specific sub-requirement for a more general parent node. However, other development approaches, such as the iterative Agile development process, use less hierarchical structures to list requirements, with the defined needs identified as use cases.

2. Development of the product

Development begins once the team agrees to the requirements. At this stage, the product moves from an idea and design to a real, working application. The development team must first break down the application requirements into pieces and phases to create a development plan.

During this time, it is beneficial to incorporate representatives from all related teams, including sales, product marketing, IT and testing. This helps ensure that the created product satisfies all defined needs and is easy to use, test and deploy.

A wide variety of development methodologies can be used during this stage. The most popular are sequential -- for example, the Waterfall model -- or iterative, such as Agile development.

3. Testing and quality assurance

Testing and quality assurance (QA) often overlap with the development stage. Testers should begin preparing their test cases and testing environments before the product is formally released. Testers should also be available to provide feedback on the application throughout development. Furthermore, integration and unit tests should be incorporated into programming activities. Development teams often use continuous integration systems.

During the formal testing and QA stage, testers must verify that the application fulfills the requirements defined in the first stage of the process. Testers should also check for all other stakeholders' expectations that the app will need to support throughout its lifecycle. This stage also includes full integration testing and addressing all issues or bugs discovered and reported by the development team.

The development and testing stages conclude when the product reaches quality and stability that is good enough for release. The product marketing team defines this level.

diagram of the five stages of application lifecycle management (ALM)
Application lifecycle management is made up of an initial defining stage, a development stage, a testing and QA stage, deployment, and then a stage of continuous maintenance and eventual retirement.

4. Deployment

The deployment stage involves releasing the product to users. This process varies depending on application type because each product type requires different attributes and specifications. For example, software-as-a-service apps must be deployed on the company's internal servers, while users can access web apps through the internet.

5. Continuous maintenance and improvement of the product

Continuous maintenance and improvement of the product occur after deployment to monitor and manage the performance of the released application. The team resolves any remaining bugs during this stage while planning and prioritizing new updates.

Maintenance is frequently the longest stage of ALM, but it might also require the least participation from the development team if previous steps were effective.

An important element of the maintenance stage is defining the system's retirement. In other words, teams must decide when work should be stopped and moved to a newer version of the product or migrated to a different product entirely.

Benefits of application lifecycle management

Some key benefits of ALM include the following:

  • Increased visibility into workflow. Application lifecycle management provides an organization with a clear direction for its workflow before developers begin building the app. During the first stage -- defining requirements -- companies create a business case, determine the app's lifespan and plan the necessary resources before committing to development. This saves the organization time and money by avoiding unnecessary work and expensive mistakes.
  • Enhanced compliance. ALM tools can help organizations track and document compliance measures throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
  • Faster deployments. ALM can streamline the development process by automating workflows and improving collaboration between teams, which enables faster releases.
  • Higher-quality products. ALM practices commonly include structured development cycles, frequent testing and continuous monitoring that help solve issues before deployment.
  • Efficiency. The integrated system created by ALM is more efficient than a collection of unconnected tools and processes spread across various teams. This integration also benefits organizations by improving communication and collaboration and by aligning software objectives with any business value or corporate goal.
  • Better collaboration. The ability for teams to collaborate ensures that each worker understands the project and its stage. ALM tools enable workers to track strategies, changes, requirements and project status in real time, regardless of location. ALM tools also prioritize the various team goals and help define the various skill sets needed for different processes.
  • Improved decision-making. ALM improves teams' decision-making abilities when dealing with aging software. Most ALM tools include version control and real-time planning, helping team leaders to map the application's future easily. This capability can also eliminate confusion for companies dealing with multiple applications.

Challenges to application lifecycle management

ALM does come with some challenges, however. These can include the following:

  • Scalability. Managing multiple applications, teams and processes in an ALM framework can be complex and difficult to scale.
  • Visibility. Visibility can be challenging when workloads are spread across multiple clouds or in a hybrid cloud system.
  • Security. Integrating security into every step of the ALM process can be challenging.
  • Need for increased communication between teams. Coordinating communication efforts between teams such as developers, operations and security can be difficult.
  • Need for increased agility. Balancing governance, control and flexibility might become enough of a challenge that it becomes difficult to increase or maintain the agility needed for rapid deployments.

Application lifecycle management tools

Numerous ALM tools, which encompass a collection of project management tools that integrate people and processes, are available for tracking application changes. These tools range from dedicated ALM products that monitor an application from inception to completion, automatically sorting files into logical buckets, to simple wikis requiring team members to manually record changes.

Organizations should look for several key features when choosing an ALM tool:

  • Version control.
  • Team communication and planning in real time.
  • Estimation and application development planning.
  • Requirements management.
  • Test management and QA.
  • Source code management.
  • Automated deployment.
  • Application portfolio management.
  • Maintenance and support.

ALM tools enable users to define project requirements and develop user stories, which can then be prioritized, scheduled and broken down into detailed tasks used for resource tracking. Resource tracking analyzes how well an organization uses its resources throughout the app's lifecycle. ALM tool users can also attach documents, screenshots and URLs to all artifacts as well as customize all graphs and reports in various formats -- including Adobe Acrobat and HTML.

ALM tools enable users to create, modify and perform test cases; manage automated and manual tests; track issues, bugs, risks and enhancements related to the source code repository; and access a complete audit history of all changes made to the application.

ALM tool dashboards can be personalized, and the reporting that appears can be customized to benefit specific users.

Some popular examples of ALM tools include the following:

  • Jama Connect.
  • MeisterTask.
  • Codebeamer.
  • Visure Requirements ALM Platform.
  • Jira.
  • Microsoft Azure DevOps.
  • Tuleap.

How ALM affects DevOps

As a software delivery approach, DevOps is all about communication. The term is a portmanteau to describe the collaborative approach that development and operations teams are meant to take. This is an important practice, as it promotes better communication and collaboration between these teams to improve software quality and development outcomes.

Both ALM and DevOps practices are complementary. They share the goal of increasing software delivery speed and quality while also increasing collaboration and communication between teams.

The ALM tools used to automate software development and deployment processes also align with DevOps core principles. They help to promote communication, as they typically enable multiple teams to collaborate throughout the application lifecycle. For example, implementing ALM development and maintenance tools in a software's lifecycle can help further streamline DevOps teams.

Application lifecycle management vs. software development lifecycle

The software development lifecycle refers to the processes or procedures involved in creating a high-quality software product. Application lifecycle management is similar to the SDLC, but it incorporates a wider range of processes.

ALM covers the entire application lifecycle, incorporating the perspective of what the business needs from an application, while the SDLC focuses more narrowly on software development and maintenance. In other words, ALM includes all five stages of the app's lifecycle -- requirements, development, testing, deployment and maintenance -- but the SDLC only focuses on a fraction of ALM.

Application lifecycle management vs. product lifecycle management

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing a product throughout its entire lifecycle. It's a very similar idea to ALM, with similar principles, but some unique identifiers make the two processes different.

The biggest difference is that, while ALM applies to software, PLM applies to physical hardware. ALM focuses on the entire software development lifecycle, including development, testing, deployment and maintenance, while PLM focuses on the entire lifecycle of physical products, including product design, production, maintenance and disposal.

Manufacturers also commonly use PLM software that can track, store and update data related to a product.

ALM and PLM tools are very similar concepts. Learn more about the differences between ALM and PLM.

This was last updated in February 2025

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