Assessing application lifecycle management potentials: An exploratory industrial case study

Software projects require a good management system to achieve a successful result because they are risky and often spread over a long period. The most important element of a good management is controlled planning. Within the scope of the project, all necessary stages of the software development life cycle need to be accurately and consistently planned and documented to complete the requirements, analysis, design, development process, estimations, risk and change control methods, test and maintenance processes in a complete and accurate manner. The notion of software lifecycle management requires the incorporation of effective software engineering processes that encompass not only development but also deployment and maintenance. Although new methodologies for software engineering continue to emerge, still software development continues to experience a significant amount of failure rates. To overcome the complexities of modern software development, agile development philosophy suggests that software developers should remain involved with the application and working continuously with stakeholders to make required changes incrementally by tracking application changes. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is an emerging trend that reflects a novel attitude towards software development also expressed as the DevOps, which blends the tasks performed by a firm's software development and systems operations teams, monitor software artifacts from inception to completion while changes are noted. The ultimate outcome from this thesis is an assessment framework for delivering ALM as a service to a set of selected software projects in a large-sized software development organization. It should guide practitioners to tailor ALM practices from the idea phase through the selection of the underlying tool set. Finally, an industrial case study is conducted to assess the usability of this approach. This study guides ALM transformation using agile best practices in a large-scale corporate environment. In light of these, a unified ALM toolset and processes will be discussed with the economic implications of the transformation process and the lessons learned.