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Just-enough application lifecycle management (ALM)
ALM has always been one of those acronyms I hear and immediately tune out. In banking, it means Asset Liability Management. In programming world, it stands for Application Lifecycle Management. So what does that mean?
Matt Heusser offers a good description in his article posted on March 1, 2010 on SearchSoftwareQuality.com:
For our purposes, let's call ALM "Any tools, technologies, or techniques that attempt to connect and maintain connections between activities over the life of a piece of software – from the first glint in the glimmer of an executive's eye, through system retirement." Notice I said attempt. It turns out that many of the important facts about a software project are never written down, and that even those that are can be misinterpreted and misunderstood. The typical project is actually a collection of ideas held in the minds of the people on the project; compressing that into relevant bits of unambiguous code will work, but English is interpreted.
With cradle-to-grave ALM, I mean a suite of tools that sits on top of all of this data, organizing it into logical buckets. Ideally, when you want to make a change to a feature, the tool creates some sort of to-do list that people can log in and check each step. Requirements approved: Check. Design Modified: Check. Code complete: Check. Story tested: FAIL. Code Compete Again: Check. You get the drift. This tool should also produce for management summary reports that talk about all that's been done, what needs to be done and what the work in progress inventory is.
A third alternative for ALM is to use a wiki, or editable web page, that is version controlled with a different "page" for each release. With a wiki you can upload files, line to branches in version control, or any other file that can be accessed by a URL, including network drive locations. Wikis allow anyone to create and revise information about a project in a loosely structured, informal way, without a lot of heavyweight signoffs and steps. You can even express stories, requirements, and acceptance criteria directly, as wiki web pages.
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