Application Lifecycle Management: Everything You Need To Know
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For a child to grow up with confidence and success, they require different things throughout their life. While a baby needs constant attention and care, a teenager needs space to spread their wings. A good parent will stay engaged with their kids from before they are born well into adulthood, but their role is constantly shifting.
When developing an application, it’s important to remember that the journey of creating a successful product doesn’t end with the initial launch. Just like raising a child, there are many steps involved in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) – from planning and designing to monitoring and maintaining.
It takes ongoing dedication, guidance, and support throughout each stage of the ALM process to ensure your application continues to grow and reach its full potential.
This is no secret. With the ALM market reaching $4.3 billion in 2022, it’s clear that companies are taking this monitoring seriously. However, without a full understanding of the application lifecycle, your team’s ALM is likely to fall flat.
What is Application Lifecycle Management
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a framework that helps teams manage the complete lifecycle of their applications from creation to retirement. The goal of ALM is to help teams be more efficient in producing high-quality applications within budget and on time.
With proper practices in place, it becomes easier for teams to continually improve their application over time without taking too much risk or sacrificing quality.
How your development process is governed and run should be a part of any digital transformation efforts, as data and technology can improve the process tenfold.
The Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management
There are several clear benefits of having standards across the entire application lifecycle.
Speed and Agility - Knowing the plan for every stage of development allows teams to continuously develop software at the breakneck pace required to stay competitive.
Real-Time Decisions - With a clear view of everything that's happened thus far in development, team leads can make decisions quickly and efficiently.
Reduced Risk - ALM helps teams identify potential points of failure before they happen, reducing the risk of costly mistakes or delays in development.
Improved Quality - Teams can ensure that their applications are built to a higher standard with fewer bugs when they have an understanding of the entire process.
When you can utilize tools like ALM Software and Stormboard in tandem, these benefits are multiplied.
Challenges of Application Lifecycle Management
In order to successfully implement an ALM strategy, you need to be aware of the potential challenges.
Training - Team members may need to be trained in order to use the tools and software associated with ALM. Like all parts of digital transformation, without proper training, the work put into setting up your strategy will fail.
Integration Issues - If teams are using multiple different tools for their application lifecycle management, there might be integration issues. It’s important to make sure that these tools all work together properly before implementation to give team members the best chance at keeping track of everything.
Pro Tip: Stormboard has bi-directional integrations into tools popular among developers and product managers alike - such as Jira, Rally, and Azure DevOps. Our integrations connect the tools in your stack with Stormboard, reducing transcription errors, clunky data translation, and administrative oversights.
Analysis - Different stages of ALM will require different forms of data. If your team is more versed in quantitative data than qualitative, it might be difficult to fully integrate everything you’re collecting. A tool like Stormboard is great for this because it focuses on taking ideas and turning them into data points that can be transformed and analyzed.
With foresight and the right tools, these challenges shouldn’t pose any issues.
Stages of the Application Lifecycle
Each stage of the Application Lifecycle comes with its own needs from management. It’s important that you have a plan in place for each stage, and know how your team will transition from one to the next.
Stage One: Governance
Before you start developing a project, you need to be clear about what the application is meant to achieve. Just like data governance provides a roadmap for data usage, application governance provides a map for every step of the development process.
It’s essential in this stage that all stakeholders are able to communicate fully and effectively. If you use Stormboard to compile this information, then any needs can be easily separated into groups. These can be compiled visually, and any questions can be linked directly to them.
Stage Two: Development
Once the requirements are agreed upon, you can start creating the product. The development process should include a few key steps.
Planning
Teams should outline the project and break it into manageable tasks. This is where the ideas generated in the governance stage become actionable data. Using an ALM software, teams can compile these steps, assign them, and keep track of progress.
Design and Building
Next, everyone will get to work creating the actual application. ALM software can give managers a bird's eye view of the work getting done so that they can identify any bottlenecks and deal with them appropriately.
Communication and clarity are vital in this stage. Teams being able to return to the original Storm and reference the needs of the project will keep them on track, and ensure that no one is working on something that isn’t necessary.
Stage Three: Testing
This stage may or may not overlap with the previous. Developers can use automated testing tools (often found in ALM software) to quickly check the app for any bugs or glitches before submitting it for review.
You can also conduct focus groups and product testing with users in this stage. Having a well-thought-out plan for capturing and implementing the ideas and qualitative data coming from these groups will be key.
Once the application meets all the needs and is up to the standards of quality expected, it’s time for a wide release.
Stage Four: Deployment
Now it’s time to send your baby out into the world. When an application is released, it is important to keep an eye on usage and performance. ALM software can help with this by providing real-time feedback, so you can make sure your application is running as expected in different environments.
It’s also a great idea to have a plan for what happens when things go wrong or don’t work as expected. You'll want automation and monitoring in place to be able to provide detailed reports and analyses of any issue that arises, helping you quickly identify the root cause and fix it.
Stage Five: Maintenance
This stage involves keeping the application up-to-date with bug fixes, feature updates, security patches, and other enhancements. It’s important to be proactive, as it can greatly reduce the amount of time spent fixing issues down the line.
While maintenance is usually the longest stage, if every other step was handled properly it won’t require much input from the team. It’s like having an adult child out in the world. You’ll see them on the holidays, but for the most part they are self-sustaining.
Stage Six: Retirement
When an application reaches its end of life, you will need to have a plan for securely removing all user data and decommissioning any resources used by the application (e.g., servers).
This is also a good time to review what went well and what could have been done better throughout each stage of development. Having a clear record of each idea and data point can be extremely helpful in learning from the process.
Stormboard produces clear and concise reports from every meeting and brainstorming session so that you can easily look through them for reference.
Conclusion
We put a lot of effort into our projects, and we must take care of them as they come to fruition. With each step of the ALM process, the application matures and reaches closer to its full potential – from design to implementation through testing and deployment.
Just like a child grows into an adult over time, so too does an application reach its final destination. By taking care of each stage with dedication, attention to detail, and the right tools throughout its lifecycle, we can ensure that our applications are ready to take on the world.
Get in touch with one of our experts for a no-obligation product demo customized to your organization’s workflow and how our integrations can improve your ALM efforts from day 1.
About the author:
A programmer by trade, Nick Saraev is a freelance writer and entrepreneur with a penchant for helping people excel in their careers. He's been featured on Popular Mechanics & Apple News, and has founded several successful companies in e-commerce, marketing, and artificial intelligence. When he's not working on his latest project, you can find him hiking or painting.
