Monday, 12 January 2009
New David Chappell ALM Whitepapers
1. What is ALM
A very good introduction of ALM and not surprisingly :-) pretty consistent with views I expressed nearly two (!) years ago in my ALM != SDLC blog post.
2. ALM and Business Strategy
This paper discussess the link between ALM and Business Strategies. It describes the importance of ALM to maintain relevance and competitiveness by building and managing custom applications.
3. ALM as a Business Process
Here ALM is seen as a business process supporting core business processes such as HR, Sales, etc. Given the high degree of automation of core business processes these days, it should not come as a surprise that ALM is fundamental to the success of organisations. I never thought of ALM as a business process - until now!
4. ALM Tool Evolution
In this paper, David looks at the tools market to support ALM. It's not an in-depth analysis of what is on the market, but more of a 'status quo' of where the industry is and where it needs to go.
My original download link is no longer working, but I hope the papers will be available soon from David's blog or website.
Friday, 2 January 2009
SDTimes new ALM resources website
Wednesday, 31 December 2008
Added a new poll..
1. Align (make sure you do the right things)
2. Build (make sure you do things right)
3. Provision (deploy and manage the things to make sure you get the expected results)
What are you most interested in? You should be interested in all of them, but if your life dependent on it, which one would you focus on first?
Monday, 29 December 2008
76% know what ALM is about - excellent!
Finally - I have a proper ALM demo environment
The environment is made up of an Office and Visual Studio client, a Domain Controller, a TFS Server, a Project Server and a System Center server. Eventually I plan to add Portfolio Server and PerformancePoint to the mix.
I guess I could have reused existing HyperV images, but I think it is invaluable to go through the full end-to-end process of setting up and configuring an environment.
Friday, 29 August 2008
ALM or SLM?
These days 'application' is more like a logical concept. Modern composite 'applications' are made up of many different components, some of them may not even reside inside your organisation. Is the workflow engine part of an apps, is the .NET library part of it, what about a data feed?
I don't know the answer but it has implications when we talk about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). How can we talk about ALM when we can't even define application boundaries?
We have been discussing this internally and the term 'Service Lifecycle Management' came up a few times... and I have to say I like it! 'Service' might be a better description of what a modern application is really about.. what do you think?
I added a poll (on the left) titled SLM or ALM (Service Lifecycle Management) ? Let me know what you think is a better term...
Monday, 28 January 2008
ALM and IO Models - how do they relate?
The models also consider different maturity levels, similar to other frameworks such as CMMI, SPICE or SixSigma. As organisations mature they increase efficiencies and effectiveness. The framework recognises four levels of maturity:
- Basic
- Standardised
- Advanced
- Dynamic
It is beyond the scope of this post to elaborate about the IO models but if you are interested there is an excellent 6-page overview available here.
So what does this have to do with ALM? A lot! To implement an effective Application Lifecycle Management platform in your organisation, you have to improve several - traditionally distinct - capabilities:
- you have to get your project/program planning and monitoring activities right
- you have to optimise your development activities
- you have to streamline your deployment and infrastructure management capabilities
It doesn't make sense to be excellent at developing software but incompetent at deployment or vice versa. Neither does it make sense to efficiently deploy applications which don't solve business needs - you have to be efficient AND effective!
It just so happens that the Microsoft IO models describe all these capabilities and a lot more (see picture below). In the context of these models, ALM is an example of a scenario delivering a value to the business (in this case effectively managing application lifecycles).
We don't use the term IO scenario here at Microsoft, but it reminds me a lot of use case scenarios. Use case scenarios are collections of related requirements, IO scenarios are collections of related IO capabilities ..... works for me!