Introduction to Integrated ALM tools

Modern business processes are becoming more tightly integrated: transport, manufacturing, and finance are closely combined to deliver increased business value to customers, thereby reducing costs. Over the past 40 years, automation has allowed business processes to develop further, bringing together professional tools and practices as a whole value chain. Customers tend to want to provide their information only once, and then assume that your technical support understands everything about them and their products, and expects the transaction to be direct and personal. Nevertheless, the processes used to create and maintain these automated systems are more differentiated and less systematic than the systems they support. A typical software delivery project takes many times to obtain requirements and describes tests in multiple places, but they do not match the specifics of a particular build, so projects often require a lot of analysis to know who is doing what and why. Software lifecycle Management (ALM), the software delivery process is more immature than the business processes it supports. But software processes have been upgraded from ancillary business processes to essential, requiring software companies to deliver high quality products to their customers quickly and directly. This means that the Software delivery organization or team must start thinking about how to better integrate their delivery rules and design a holistic, integrated ALM approach.

Integration value is difficult to evaluate, but without it, the project will not succeed

How many times have you been in a meeting where everyone is confused about something similar, but not exactly the same? Or are you busy figuring out what the meeting is about 30 minutes before the meeting? And if the conference includes people from different sectors, geographies or organizations, the problem will be even more serious. Modern software delivery teams are made up of people from many different places, including: development, project management, business, and outsourced testing agencies. Each organization uses its own specific toolset, as well as its own practices and processes, and it is optimized on its own team, not end-to-end. Collaboration between organizations is often the responsibility of the project's current team, for example: When a project is run primarily by a development team, the development team is responsible for sharing stories and tasks. When testing is a major concern, defects and problems are communication bridges. When a single team drives a phase, it often ignores all previous work and excludes the work of other teams, and the gaps between teams are filled by specific processes, spreadsheets, and wikis. The result is a futile and annoying meeting; More importantly, the problems that need to be addressed are often overlooked, leading to poor software, growing flaws, and costly project delays. The "integration" of all people is often denied because of the following:

Ownership--It is simple to stipulate who will be responsible for the improvement in a particular area, but who is responsible for the interaction between the two domains? For example, who should be responsible for improving the relationship between development and testing? It is very difficult to improve without explicit ownership.

Geographical, organizational, and political boundaries-indeed, the organizational structure of any large organization is constantly evolving as it is managed and controlled by political boundaries. It is very difficult to break these barriers, because the things we pursue are as hard to control as collaboration.

Metrics-Software delivery has always been advertised as having a poor metric, and even a limited metric is usually focused on a particular area, such as focusing only on testing, developing or planning one. Integration is difficult to measure because of its natural characteristics, but without a definite metric, it is difficult to pay attention or improve it.

Inertia--Change is never easy--it's always uncertain, and because of the negative experience of inefficient reforms from the leadership, most employees are biased against it,

Management and compliance need to rely on a comprehensive perspective

No matter how big the organization is, it is important to be aware of what is happening at any time, targeting, time, and people involved in auditing and compliance. As work continues to be assigned to various departments, software products, processes, and specific personnel, it becomes increasingly difficult to coordinate any one or a set of behaviors. For example, a security requirement for a system includes code, testing, work items, bugs, available software, and operating tickets. If the demand changes halfway through, it is generally difficult to measure when and why, let alone address its impact. If the change exists only in the code, it can cause compliance problems. Even if organizations do not comply with specific government regulations, they should have a clear measure of impact, traceability and process control to manage their processes. Traceability can be weakened by the following points:

The tools used to store information are not connected. Each tool stores its own intermediate files, often with its own clear mechanism around history and versioning. But as the work continues to spread to different departments, the links between the intermediate documents are disconnected.

Traceability management is a huge expense. It is not particularly time-consuming to document the relationship between two things, but it is difficult to update those specific metrics and links at any time.

Traceability meta model. Project, creating a document does not appear to have priority when we are trying to submit the software before the deadline. Document records across teams/artifacts are more difficult to implement. Because there is not enough time to understand the relationship between work products and document factors, it is difficult to provide traceability, let alone judge whether they are needed. Each project is not the same, plus the application of the agile approach, the project may execute its own process based on different problem areas or teams.