ALM, DevOps, and Transformation: Piecing the Puzzle Together

Jaikrishnan K

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and DevOps are essential for any company providing software development services.

Adoption of this disruptive technology has helped many companies to innovate faster and leave their competitors behind. On the other hand, IT organizations that are yet to discover ALM and DevOps are struggling with legacy practices and tools, manual processes, siloed organizational structures, and cultural inertia.

The ability to scale capacity on demand automatically is one of the chief advantages of ALM and DevOps, especially when they are combined with cloud computing. However, there is more to scalability than just server and network capacity.

Companies must also ensure that the tools they rely on can seamlessly scale with the infrastructure, and that the applications they are delivering through their DevOps environments are designed to take full advantage of the increased capacity.

For companies that are getting started on ALM and DevOps, it may be fine to adopt a DIY approach towards learning the technology. But once your company has committed to the philosophy, investing in the education and re-orientation of resources must become a priority. The scope of reskilling encompasses tactical skills for continuous delivery, continuous integration, agile and lean development and testing, collaborative workflows, cloud orchestration, and security. Any company that provides ALM and DevOps solutions should ideally provide flexibility to client and delivery teams to focus more on core application delivery and quality without worrying about operations, monitoring, and maintenance, thus augmenting the overall process by implementing centralized and automated environments.

Following are some instances in which we harnessed the power of ALM and DevOps to help our clients:

• One of our clients was able to standardize Continuous Integration and Delivery using Atlassian tools, Jenkins, and AWS. This implementation helped the client to minimize project startup time, automate development and testing tasks, and complete large, complex projects faster. The client’s project startup time reduced from months to weeks; reliable development- and build-environments were established, and staffing flexibility and scalability improved.

• For another client, we implemented automated CI/CD pipeline with provisioning of all environments for auto scalability, auto healing, continuous monitoring of containers and applications, which led to reduced manual intervention and high availability.

Look for these aspects while considering a potential ALM and DevOps portfolio:

• Identification of gaps in the existing SDLC tools and process flow across the software development value chain
• Establishment of practices under each of the SDLC segments to surpass the challenges unique to the specific project or environment
• Use of commercial or open-source framework to facilitate ALM processes
• Continuous training and consultation pertaining to ALM systems to various stakeholders
• Scheduling of process audits and iterative improvements in the ALM framework

With these strengths firmly in place, ALM and DevOps would be a force to reckon with. DevOps and ALM solutions are not magic spells; together, they act as catalysts of extraordinary transformation, provided you have what it takes to ride this wave.

(Jaikrishnan K is Sr. Vice President–Operations, Cybage Software Pvt. Ltd. Views expressed here are of the author and CyberMedia does not necessarily endorse them.)