The competitive business environment pressurizes the enterprises to speedup the delivery schedules which further demands development of new and innovative applications. Though efficiency of the software may lead to reduction in turn around time, the presence of budgetary constraints and the requirement of quality products, leads eanterprises consider new application developments a challenge.

1. Application Lifecycle Management for the Global Enterprises
The competitive business environment pressurizes the enterprises to speed up the delivery schedules
which further demands development of new and innovative applications. Though efficiency of the
software may lead to reduction in turn around time, the presence of budgetary constraints and the
requirement of quality products, leads enterprises consider new application developments a
challenge.
The software development life cycle with its various different stages from initiation to concept
development, planning , requirement analysis, design development integration, testing to
implementation and maintenance are interdependent. However, as per the requirements in size
and complexity of the project these various stages can also be combined or overlapped. Further to
increase the efficiency of software development, enterprises can coordinate the software
development activities with application lifecycle management . Forrester defines application lifecycle
management as "the coordination of development life-cycle activities, including requirements,
modeling, development, build, and testing, through:
 enforcement of processes that span these activities
 management of relationships between development artifacts used or produced by these
activities
 reporting on progress of the development effort as a whole."
Application Lifecycle Management is thus a synchronization of various activities that will enable
software development teams to work on development of high quality software applications even
with constraints on time and cost. ALM system being a continuous process for managing the
lifecycle of applications makes use of software engineering tools for requirements management
,requirements traceability matrix ,testing, issues management, risk management, release
management, project management, document management, test automation and debugging. The
use of these tools help in enhancing the productivity and quality standards and improves the delivery
mechanism across global teams by breaking through the boundaries. The strength of the application
management system lies in its traceability and reporting analytics customized integration of tools.
Leading service providers offer global enterprises application lifecycle management system an
automated web-based management system that has the ability to incorporate traditional as well as
agile methodology. For the enterprises catering to offshore locations and working through distant
teams, the ALM solutions can be integrated with business management tools in a customized
manner. Further, the multiple input methods allows for import of files from other document
formats.
Such integrations of Application Lifecycle management solutions facilitates project teams with easy
access to business critical information and also helps in implementing the software development
lifecycle. The global platform for implementing the SDLC increases productivity and business
prospects and gives the enterprises an edge over their competitors.
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