Customer Control & Best-of-Breed ALM
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.
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Today's Development 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 configuration management (SCM) and issue tracking 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 lifecycle management, or ALM, is a process managed through the tight integration of software development lifecycle tools. The most advanced development environments utilize these ALM tools in an integrated manner, with a single repository, integrated processes and workflow, and ultimately comprehensive artifact traceability throughout the development lifecycle.
Slow adoption of ALM
"What tends to happen is that customers buy one or two pieces," said Bola Rotibi (1/06), senior analyst at U.K.-based research firm Ovum, referring to requirements management, issue tracking, source code control, testing and defect tracking tools, among others. "And some customers use the tools only as point products, rather than in the ALM way."
Click here for more information on Choosing ALM Solutions
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AccuRev Solutions |
| Overview |
| Business Process |
| Release Engineering |
| Project Management |
| Software Development |
| Best-of-Breed ALM |
More Information - direct links to resources and how to contact AccuRev |
