Application Lifecycle Management
Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management"
from Wikipedia

Its main expected benefits are:

  • Increases productivity, as the team shares best practices for development and deployment, and developers need focus only on current business requirements
  • Improves quality, so the final application meets the needs and expectations of users
  • Breaks boundaries through collaboration and smooth information flow
  • Accelerates development through simplified integration
  • Cuts maintenance time by synchronizing application and design
  • Maximizes investments in skills, processes, and technologies
  • Increases flexibility by reducing the time it takes to build and adapt applications that support new business initiatives

Application Lifecycle Management

Figure 1 Application Lifecycle Management in the Enterprise

A good overview of what ALM is can be seen in the Figure 1, which links ALM with other typical business practices like RM (Requirements Management) and PPM (Project Portfolio Management) providing a clear picture of where ALM stands in a typical enterprise context, and stressing the central role that it should have in bridge business requirements to reality. With success.