Customer Control and Best-of-Breed ALM Solutions
Software development organizations today are wrestling with many critical decisions regarding selection of development tools, and none may be as important as whether to select a single-vendor application lifecycle management (ALM) solution, or to go with a best-of-breed approach. These choices are often difficult because each group within the organization may have different criteria on which they are basing their answer to this question, and both have their advantages. Even for the VP Engineering or CIO, who are often juggling competing goals around minimizing the number of vendors/suppliers versus shipping the highest quality on-time releases, choosing the most beneficial and least disruptive approach for the organization is a struggle.
The Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) suite vendors (e.g., IBM, Borland, etc.) often focus on Requirements Management or Quality Management and provide few direct benefits to software developers. In contrast, AccuRev provides a platform that is the basis for designing, implementing and enforcing the software development process. AccuRev helps development organizations implement effective agile processes, including continuous integration, and improves the execution of parallel development with both local and geographically distributed teams. As a best-of-breed provider, AccuRev also maintains key partnerships with vendors in the Agile PM, Change Management , Build and Test areas, so that organizations can use AccuRev SCCM as their primary development platform while leveraging the benefits of best-of-breed tools in these other important areas. Additionally, AccuRev fully integrates with ALM solutions through AccuBridge integrations.
Today's Development Tools Environment
There are a wide variety of software development tool usage models, with many organizations focused on improving overall productivity through the use of more efficient tools. Most development organizations today utilize:
- IDEs for developers
- Build tools for the release engineers and quality assurance teams, and
- Software change and configuration management (SCCM) across the engineering organization
Somewhat more advanced development and larger teams often include:
- Product management and architects utilizing requirements management and modeling tools
- Test/QA team utilizing tools to build automated tests, and
- Project managers and team leads using project management tools
Application life cycle management (ALM) is defined as a set of processes and supporting tools to plan, measure, manage and report development activities for development teams and partner stakeholders. In their highest form, ALM processes mitigate the challenges of diverse teams, diverse tools and diverse interests.
Slow adoption of ALM
According to analyst firms, vendors are still overpromoting the degree to which suites of products interoperate today. The implementations of the past several years have relied heavily on custom coding to achieve reasonable levels of control. Often times an ALM suite of tools is selected from one vendor, only to learn after deployment that the ability to efficiently manage geographically distributed, agile or parallel development is severely limited. While the workflow and dashboard capabilities were strong for managers, the information they ultimately received was not accurate due to the poor core abilities from the software change and configuration management component. Or worse, developers revolted against the components they use daily and moved to an open source alternative not capable of managing this type of environment or resulting in a loss of compliance, auditability and traceability.
