Application Lifecycle Management
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a genre of computerized systems which allows system development corporations to efficiently and more easily manage, maintain and handle the applications lifecycle. These ALM systems have a wide variety of tools which can be integrated to enable and support collaborative work, while they act at the core of the organisation. Todays ALM systems support flexible system development methods throughout the entire development process. This paper focuses on a case-study of a Swedish business- and technology corporation and their use of two ALM systems with an aim to unravel the differences between these systems and their functionality to serve as a basis for decision making regarding their utilization of best practice with their ALM-Systems. Meanwhile we studied their approach to ALM systems to see if they were using them according to the initial idea of ALM systems. The study is of a qualitative characteristic and both semi-structured interviews with employees and self-gathered data have been used to enable our research and the creation of benchmarks. The results from our study show that the corporation uses both their ALM systems as intended from the initial idea, but we have identified a need to integrate one of the ALM systems with their costumer support portal through a web service. To enable this integration they will raise the amount of affordance to a distinctive degree due to the seamless connection and communication between the ALM system and the customer portal.