Volume 9 - Number 4 - April 2011

This month, we focus on the robust value of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) in the highly productive world of Agile development. Most hands-on technology professionals have experienced the productivity gains of rapid iterative development with all of the best practices that have become associated with becoming Agile. ALM in an Agile World adds even more value by providing robust repeatable processes that help your team to track requirements, test cases, and work items throughout the entire lifecycle. ALM shines the spotlight on tools integration and full lifecycle processes. This month, our writers further illuminate how to enjoy the value of ALM in an Agile world.

Bob DeMaria, Agile Evangelist and trainer with Accurev, gets us started with Hybrid Agile and PureCM's Pat Burma presents "What it Means to be Agile" while XebiaLabs VP of Product Management Andrew Phillips explains that "Deployment is the New Build".  My good friend Ben Weatherall has us all disintegrating in "Continuous Disintegration" while veteran Joe Farah presents "CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Agile World ALM." Batting cleanup, I present my own thoughts on "ALM in an Agile World and also Agile in an ALM world" in Behaviorally Speaking. Your views and experiences are also very important to us at CM Crossroads. Please make sure that you drop us a line to share your own experiences being Agile with ALM!

Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello@acm.org

Featured articles...

ALM Tools in an Agile World by Patrick Burma What does it mean to be Agile? Agile comes in many different flavors, and a lot of ALM tools vendors are marketing the heck out of agile. Certainly for myself I had a much different view of what it means to fully adopt an agile practice after reading Ken Schwaber and also becoming ScrumMaster Certified. Agile can come across as pretty wild and crazy at first, especially when you get into the specific flavors. For example in eXtreme Programming (XP) there's paired programming where 2 developers share one computer when writing code; a little odd for many people. And Agile practices have all sorts of new ideas on team compositions and dynamics, like no more project managers. PMP's need not apply at a Scrum shop...well maybe, it depends who you ask and how each shop or team adopts agile. Read More >>

Is Your Development Team “Hybrid Agile?” by Bob DeMaria Hybrids are the union of two similar functions that have a different focus combined to do one thing really well. They are meant to provide optimal flexibility, efficiency, and adaptability, without sacrificing quality. For example, a hybrid golf club combines a fairway wood and long iron, allowing for a golf ball to be hit long distances with pinpoint accuracy. It’s a best of both worlds combination. Other common hybrids, such as cars, also provide optimal levels of efficiency, but can the same be said for Agile application lifecycle management?  Is a hybrid approach- a combination of Agile and non-Agile practices- the best option when scaling to enterprise teams? Read More >>

CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Agile World ALM by Joe Farah As agile methods are adopted more and more, it is crucial that ALM tools and processes grow to support these projects. Next Generation ALM tools must not interfere with development by adding overhead.  Instead, they must help to increase efficiencies and productivity of all roles as part of the agile backbone.  To explore what this means, we look at several components of an agile shop. Read More >>

More articles...

Behaviorally Speaking – ALM in an Agile World by Bob Aiello Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) may not survive the undeniable success of the Agile movement. I know developers who won't even take a job with a company that fails to embrace Agile practices. ALM certainly has it's own following, but how does ALM operate in a world where so many organizations embrace Agility? The truth is that ALM and Agile enjoy a tremendous amount of synergy and this article will look at how ALM thrives in an Agile World! Read More >> Continuous Dis-Integration by Ben Weatherall Pretty much everyone is now familiar with Continuous Integration (CI) builds. Fewer are aware of the distinction between those CI builds and Continuous Integration itself. And even fewer are aware of the pitfalls that can await the unwary when they venture down this path, for it is fraught with unseen perils that can lie dormant until one least expects them. CI can be an adventure story to rival the opening of the American West or Australian Outback. Read More >>

Deployment is the New Build by Andrew Phillips As companies focus on tuning their IT environment on rapid delivery of business value, more and more projects and initiatives within organizations are looking at the entire value chain of software production. Whether under the trendy name of Devops, via integrated project teams or as part of the introduction of new development methodologies like Agile or infrastructure technologies such as cloud, there is a growing awareness of the need for automated, reliable and flexible deployment procedures. Read More >>

Is The Enterprise ALM Stack Ready for the Disruption of Open Source? by Mik Kersten Development managers at large organizations with monolithic application lifecycle management (ALM) stacks once had it good.  Change and configuration management tools were well-integrated, played nicely with one another, and when they didn’t, there was someone to call.  But over the past decade open source tools have moved in, popularized by developers’ demand for lighter-weight collaboration and change management facilities.  At a cheap or free price point, these tools were often deployed without the IT department’s knowledge or approval.  This article examines the benefits that open source ALM and tools has brought to developer productivity, and discusses the problems that many organizations are experiencing with the lack of integration between these tools and the rest of their ALM and CM stack. Read More >>