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ALM Software: The Comprehensive Solution for Your Company Needs

Best Practices to Ensure Software Development Success
One of the primary benefits of an application lifecycle management (ALM) software system is its ability to empower development-intensive companies to implement and enforce best practices across their organization.

But why are ALM best practices so critical to software development?

Companies that have spent years designing and building software applications have learned many important lessons along the way. This knowledge of what works, what doesn’t, what mistakes are most common, what obstacles are likely to arise, and what steps should be taken to overcome them must be clearly communicated to others who will be involved in future development projects. ALM solutions are a great way to facilitate this kind of information-sharing, helping companies avoid past mistakes so they can ensure that the software they create meets the expectations of customers or internal end-users.

Additionally, these businesses are faced with increasingly stringent guidelines when it comes to IT compliance and governance. Without an ALM solution in place, they will have a hard time managing the various regulatory requirements – both internal and external – that will impact their most important software development activities.

ALM enables the effective creation and rapid sharing of best practices for virtually every major phase of the software application development lifecycle, including:

  • Initial research
  • Requirements planning
  • Prototyping, engineering, and design
  • Estimating (costs, time-to-market, resource consumption, etc.)
  • Programming
  • Testing
  • Change control
  • Risk management
  • Issue and defect tracking
  • Metrics definition and measurement


By giving companies the mechanisms to develop and communicate complete standards for the planning and execution of the above processes, ALM software improves the predictability and efficiency of all related procedures, while increasing control over and visibility into the entire project from end-to-end. As a result, development-intensive organizations – whether they are producing software for sale to customers and other third-parties, or building it to satisfy internal technology requirements – can better manage the entire application lifecycle, including how each phase of the project is carried out, how assessment and feedback are conducted at the end of each major task, how financial, human, and technology resources are allocated and tracked, how the applications are put into production, and how they are managed after implementation.

This is particularly important for companies that leverage a globally distributed development model. Organizations like these are faced with even greater complexity when it comes to resource coordination and optimization, security, task ownership, and other aspects of their projects. ALM can simplify these activities by allowing them to establish and share best practices for managing them.

With ALM, companies can continually assess, improve, and refine their core development processes, and share standards and best practices across all teams involved in the design and delivery of software applications. This, in turn, will optimize productivity and cost-efficiency and ensure creation of the highest quality finished product possible.

Ready to review the top ALM software vendors? Browse our free Business-Software Top 10 ALM Software report to compare leading application development solutions by pricing and key features.