Intland Software has sponsored this post.

Many PLM users might be wondering, “What is the deal with application lifecycle management (ALM)?” At its core, ALM covers the whole lifecycle of software development from the determination of its requirements, risk management, coding, testing and DevOps.

“The acronyms do sound similar, but that doesn't change the fact that they are very different tools,” said Kristof Horvath, Content Manager at Intland Software. “It's a relatively new solution to a new set of problems that are just coming to a lot of product developers. Companies operating in traditionally manufacturing-focused industries are realizing that digital transformation is increasingly forcing them to build out software capabilities. Even though they may have been using PLM for years or decades in their product manufacturing/engineering, they may not have heard about ALM at all.”

Horvath explains that essentially, ALM is for software what PLM is for hardware and mechanical product development. It can also be utilized for product line engineering to streamline the production and development of software and product families that contain various overlapping and unique features.

“Product Lifecycle Management as a discipline—and as a set of tools available on the market—has been around for decades to support the manufacturing of physical products,” said Horvath. “PLM tools help manage the lifecycle of such hardware products including engineering, design, manufacturing and disposal. Thus, PLM platforms help increase efficiency, reduce waste and accelerate the development of mechanical products. However, PLM tools only focus on hardware, with capabilities like managing a BOM and CAD integration for mechanical engineering.”

He continued, “As software is becoming a part of more and more products, a process further accelerated by digital X, there is a need for tools providing similar benefits for the software realm. ALM helps unlock efficiencies in the delivery of complex technology products with software-specific features and capabilities.”

When is ALM Useful to Organizations?

Now that we understand what sets ALM and PLM apart, how can PLM users benefit from these related, but entirely different, sets of tools? As Horvath mentioned, products are becoming more complex and much of that complexity is coming from digitalization. It’s been said a million times: you don’t buy a car anymore; you buy a smart vehicle that connects to the web and assists the driver.

Maximilian Kehl, Key Account Manager at Intland, added his thoughts on this concept. “If you take a car seat as an example, years back car buyers assessed them purely by physical features such as the leather used or their build quality. In the meanwhile, the car seat is digitized. It can detect whether a person is sitting on it, there are functions for heating, cooling and it memorizes different seating positions. Therefore, suppliers of former mechanical components now need ALM to enrich the feature set of their products by software driven functions."

Intelligent products require software development, meaning organizations that once solely focused on hardware are now hiring more programmers—and therefore utilizing more software development tools. ALM can integrate these tools into a heterogeneous toolchain for the development team.

“While handling artifacts could be seen as a similarity PLM and ALM are used in different areas of engineering,” Kehl added. “This is visible if you look at the other tools they are integrating with. PLM integrates with ERP, E-CAD and M-CAD while ALM connects with solutions for software-testing, -design and -modeling." 

How ALM Software Benefits the Entire Company

Horvath notes that the most prominent areas with pain points experienced by Intland Software’s customers, before they adopt ALM, include:

• Requirements management
• Traceability management
• Change control
• Collaboration
• Audit preparation
• Process control problems

Traditional ALM software focuses on software product development, which mostly helps engineers and QA teams. For coders and developers working directly on the software, it makes their lives easier by automating tasks such as documentation, change control, process control and traceability. It automatically establishes links between work items so that there are fewer tedious tasks and human errors. Team collaboration should then improve, making development faster, smoother and more efficient.

For those auditing the system, ALM represents a clear and transparent digital documentation that is easy to search, browse and assess. As for those troubleshooting the system, ALM offers added traceability.

“ALM reduces the time to prove compliance with regulatory requirements in safety-critical industries such as automotive systems development, medical device development, aviation systems engineering or even pharmaceutical manufacturing,” said Horvath. “For instance, it helps the digital approval processes by utilizing tools like regulatory compliant e-signatures for signoffs.”

“For those at the executive level,” he added, “ALM represents better profitability, accelerated product innovation and improved collaboration within the company. With these tools, organizations are better able to capture intellectual property (IP), reduce software infrastructure (and the costs associated with it), and streamline workflows.”

For managers, these added tools can represent reduced development times and costs, and a speedy time to market. Software development will become clearer, and it will be easier to assess accountability. ALM can be integrated into, and manage, existing workflows including those that utilize third party tools.

What Role Do Legacy Systems Play in a ALM Environment?

Implementing Application Lifecycle Management shouldn’t be seen as an all-or-nothing process. For example, the transition from legacy systems and tools can be gradual and optional.

“If and when ALM provides a better option and is easy to migrate, legacy tools can be discarded to save maintenance costs. When that is not an option, ALM enables parallel use through integrations so that the toolchain can be modernized without disruption. ALM can simply import/export data from and to these legacy tools, in some cases with real-time data exchange, via integrations,” Horvath said.

“Using legacy tools does pose a variety of risks,” he added. “It can increase costs due to outdated infrastructure and security threats or break integrations with every update. It requires too much ongoing customization and manual work translating into high maintenance costs.”

"In other words,” Horvath explained, “ALM can be used to replace many of the tools used in requirements engineering, software development and product testing. However, some teams will want to keep their specialized platforms—for instance, to manage their CI/CD pipelines in a DevOps environment. In these scenarios, ALM can be used as a central development hub to provide a management layer that sits on top of workflows and helps the team keep track of and manage the development process across the lifecycle."

How to Decide That You Need ALM Software?

If an organization is already producing code, then ALM is a useful tool to integrate into development workflows, assuming this has not been done already. However, for traditional manufacturers the answer to this question becomes a little fuzzier.

"Software enables a broad variety of business models. Therefore, existing as well as newly founded companies focus on software- / data-driven business models. ALM will be an integral part of the toolset those companies will need to pursue their digitized product development." Kehl said.

Once it’s established that an organization needs ALM technology, it might be useful to learn how other organizations have implemented the technology in the past. To learn more on that, read Medtronic: A global MedTech giant implementing Agile development with codebeamer.