What Is Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)? - TechTarget

Stages of application lifecycle management

Application lifecycle management consists of five stages:

1. Defining requirements

When defining requirements, all stakeholders gather to declare what they need from the application to support their business cases. A design of the application is created based on their expressed needs. Requirements can include a range of factors, including the business needs of the stakeholders as well as compliance and governance requirements.

Specifying requirements usually happens top-down, meaning the needs start with the most general and move into the more specific and detailed. As a result, case requirements are often in a hierarchical tree structure, with each node representing a more specific sub-requirement for a more general parent node. However, other development approaches, such as the iterative Agile development process, use less hierarchical structures to list requirements, with the defined needs identified as use cases.

2. Development of the product

Development begins once the team agrees to the requirements. At this stage, the product moves from an idea and design to a real, working application. The development team must first break down the application requirements into pieces and phases to create a development plan.

During this time, it is beneficial to incorporate representatives from all related teams, including sales, product marketing, IT and testing. This helps ensure that the created product satisfies all defined needs and is easy to use, test and deploy.

A wide variety of development methodologies can be used during this stage. The most popular are sequential -- for example, the Waterfall model -- or iterative, such as Agile development.

3. Testing and quality assurance

Testing and quality assurance (QA) often overlap with the development stage. Testers should begin preparing their test cases and testing environments before the product is formally released. Testers should also be available to provide feedback on the application throughout development. Furthermore, integration and unit tests should be incorporated into programming activities. Development teams often use continuous integration systems.

During the formal testing and QA stage, testers must verify that the application fulfills the requirements defined in the first stage of the process. Testers should also check for all other stakeholders' expectations that the app will need to support throughout its lifecycle. This stage also includes full integration testing and addressing all issues or bugs discovered and reported by the development team.

The development and testing stages conclude when the product reaches quality and stability that is good enough for release. The product marketing team defines this level.

4. Deployment

The deployment stage involves releasing the product to users. This process varies depending on application type because each product type requires different attributes and specifications. For example, software-as-a-service apps must be deployed on the company's internal servers, while users can access web apps through the internet.

5. Continuous maintenance and improvement of the product

Continuous maintenance and improvement of the product occur after deployment to monitor and manage the performance of the released application. The team resolves any remaining bugs during this stage while planning and prioritizing new updates.

Maintenance is frequently the longest stage of ALM, but it might also require the least participation from the development team if previous steps were effective.

An important element of the maintenance stage is defining the system's retirement. In other words, teams must decide when work should be stopped and moved to a newer version of the product or migrated to a different product entirely.