The importance of Application Lifecycle Management

What is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)?

Application Lifecycle refers to the entire journey of a product or application, from initial conception to its final requirements and beyond. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the process of managing all stages of an application’s life, from planning and design to development, deployment, maintenance, and eventual retirement. It integrates people, processes, and tools to ensure each phase runs smoothly and efficiently. ALM has become the industry standard for delivering high-quality releases on time and within budget.

While ALM is commonly associated with software products, its approach and phases can be applied to any product development lifecycle. Today, every company, whether it’s a bank, dairy farm, or retail chain, relies heavily on custom software development to ensure a seamless digital experience. As businesses increasingly depend on technology, having a well-defined strategy to manage the application lifecycle is essential.

ALM integrates disciplines like project management, software development, quality assurance, and IT service management to ensure that applications meet business needs and are delivered efficiently. For software development teams, it provides a framework for collaboration, progress tracking, and quality assurance, ensuring that projects are managed effectively from start to finish.

One of the core advantages of ALM is its ability to streamline and optimize the development process. By using ALM tools, organizations can automate key tasks like development, testing, deployment, and maintenance, saving time and reducing the risk of human error. These tools also enable cross-functional teams to collaborate and communicate more effectively, ensuring that each phase of the application lifecycle is aligned with business goals and meets compliance requirements.

ALM is also essential for managing application quality and ensuring security throughout the lifecycle. With integrated tools for version control, issue tracking, and continuous integration, teams can maintain high-quality standards, catch bugs early, and deploy more reliable applications. These features are especially important as applications grow in complexity, with the need to maintain consistent updates, patches, and security fixes.

Phases of Application Lifecycle Management

Let’s take a look at the various phases of ALM and how they help in building a high-quality product, on time.

Requirements gathering

The first phase of the Application Lifecycle begins with requirements gathering and analysis. This is a very crucial phase because getting the requirements right is key to building the right product the first time. Multiple stakeholders have a role to play in defining the requirements scope to support their business case.

Requirements don’t just include business needs or feature specifications but also compliance and governance requirements.

There are multiple tools for requirements gathering used across industries such as IBM DOORS Next Generation, Modern Requirements, Jama Connect etc. Using tools to capture requirements helps maintain traceability and version control on the latest set of requirements.

Development phase

The product development commences when all the requirements have been finalised. At this stage, the project now moves from an idea to design and development. The development team breaks down the requirements specified into pieces and creates a phased development plan. There are many popular development approaches such as Waterfall model, Agile or DevOps model etc.

Based on the methodology, development teams and engineers use multiple tools to organize their tasks and manage the workflow effectively. For instance tools like Jira help manage the workflow and issues with its scrum and kanban boards and customized workflows.

Effective application lifecycle management is closely tied to the choice of application architecture, which influences how applications are developed and maintained throughout their lifecycle. To explore how different architecture models have evolved to support modern development practices, check out our blog on Application Architecture Models and Their Evolution.

Testing and quality assurance

Without appropriate testing and quality assurance, there is no way to ascertain whether the development is on track and quality. Testers and Quality Assurance professionals verify that the application meets all the requirements that were specified at the outset. In addition, using a variety of testing approaches, the QA team also uncovers hard-to-predict scenarios and edge-cases that can lead to massive performance or software errors. Different types of tests are performed such as acceptance testing, integration testing, functional testing, performance testing, stress testing etc.

In the modern ALM context, QA is not an afterthought but almost a parallel activity alongside development to ensure that critical bugs are identified early in the lifecycle preventing expensive and risky product release delays. Ideally, testers should be able to feed back on the application throughout the cycle.

The development and testing stages conclude once the application achieves a level of quality and stability that’s appropriate for release. Again, testers and QAs leverage best-of-breed test management and test automation tools to make the process more seamless and transparent.

Deployment

The deployment stage is when the product is finally deployed in production. The process varies based on the type of application that is being built. Typically, software as a service (SaaS) apps can be deployed on internal servers whereas web based apps are accessible through the internet.

Operations and maintenance

Just because a product has gone live, it doesn’t mean the lifecycle ends here. In the operations and maintenance phase, teams monitor and manage the application. In the DevOps world, this phase covers the “release” , “config” and “monitor” elements.

QA also plays a role here by finding and resolving bugs in the production environment. Finally, teams plan and prioritize the next updates to the product.

Why is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Important?

ALM helps organizations stick to the requirements and release quality applications on time. It streamlines the entire lifecycle from ideation to delivery and makes sure that the product is thoroughly vetted and tested to meet the functional requirements as well as customer expectations.

But above all, it helps team members stay on the same page by improving communication, collaboration and transparency.

There are a number of ALM solutions available in the market that help you monitor and track the lifecycle of the product from requirements gathering to deployment.

Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Image showing of Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management

Enhanced visibility into the workflow

ALM helps enterprises to make more informed decisions regarding their application health. With features such as real-time planning and version control, stakeholders can quickly map out the application’s future. ALM offers a clear direction for the workflow when the app is at the idea stage.

Better compliance

As applications are built on increasingly shorter timelines but in accordance with an evolving set of requirements and regulations, compliance is important. ALM offers better control over mapping compliance requirements to testing and coverage making it easier for regulated industries like pharma and healthcare to meet their audit goals.

Improved traceability

Are development and testing aligned to the defined requirements? How do you identify crucial gaps in test coverage? ALM solutions help establish virtual traceability between requirements, risks, tests and other activities. In fact, some of the modern tools enable e-Signature and other forms of virtual authentication necessary for defined milestones.

Faster deployments and high-quality products

With extensive visibility and collaboration across the project lifecycle, critical risks and defects are identified quickly and stakeholders can make better decisions. ALM not only offers a framework for software development but also helps you manage your application over time. The increased transparency and collaboration helps you release better quality products faster.