What Does Application Lifecycle Management Mean?
Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the combined coordination of various development life cycle activities, such as requirements, modeling development, build and testing by:
- Proper enforcement of processes that cover these activities.
- Managing relationships between development artifacts used or produced by these activities.
- Creating progress reports of the complete development cycle.
Application lifecycle management is also known as software lifecycle management.
Techopedia Explains Application Lifecycle Management
The ALM process involves managing the application lifecycle through governance, development and operations. Considered the cohesive bond of the development life cycle, ALM always begins with an idea, which leads to the development of the application. After the application is created, the next step is deployment in a live environment. Once the application loses its business value, it reaches the end of life, where it is no longer used.
Although ALM does not support particular life cycle management process activities, it keeps all the activities in sync. ALM advantages are as follows:
- Sharing best practices helps increase developer productivity.
- Smooth information flow and collaborative work help break boundaries.
- ALM reduces time to develop and adapt applications.
- Simplified integration accelerates the development process.
ALM disadvantages are as follows:
- Increases the overall application cost.
- Directly responsible for vendor lock-in.
