Our goal is to help you create smarter Products by us working together as a team
Our Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) encompasses all the practices, processes, and tools that aid in the management of an application’s lifecycle from both a business and a development perspective. The key capabilities of our ALM platform include the ability to handle all your development processes including change management, workflow, source code management, task management, testing and bug tracking, lab management, reporting and analytics.
ALM Software Selection
We define a bespoke and tailored ALM for every project, including only those processes required according to the specific targets of each project. We use our ALM to manage projects from the start to the end of its lifecycle. To achieve this, we use a range of available software products and applications to meet the specific ALM requirements, i.e. Tuleap, Jira, Jama, Polarion, PTC Integrity and others.
Configuration and Training
We select and install the most appropriate tools for your specific project, undertake all necessary configuration such that it meets your needs and provide any training that your team may require in order for them to use it on a daily basis.
No More Misunderstandings
The advantage of our solution is that it provides you with full traceability during the development and production phases of your product lifecycle. Additionally, the details of your work are fully transparent to any third-party teams working with you in the development program. This can save you a lot of time and effort by reducing the need for inter-team discussions and minimizing misunderstandings.
How We Understand ALM
We have not invented anything new, we add value because we understand the process in depth.
Our application’s lifecycle starts at the drawing board, where you as the customer define what functions you need your application to do in order to support your business cases. This is our source for the creation of the system requirements.
Usually, these requirements, documented in the system specification, are shown as a hierarchical tree structure, where each node is a sub-requirement for its larger parent node.
We categorize each system requirement in the system specification (e.g., by module, feature, etc.) and prioritize them: what is a must, what can come later, etc.
After the requirements specification stage is complete, the development of the application can commence.
Initially, our team sits together and breaks down the application’s system requirements into groups and development phases. This process includes all key stakeholders including representatives from the different teams involved: development, testing, product marketing, support, sales, etc.
The goal is to validate the system requirements against the customer requests, to ensure that the application being developed will answer all the real needs, as well as being easy to use, test and deploy.
During the development phase, our software and hardware test teams begin preparing their tests-cases and test environments ready for the start of the testing phase.
The test teams also maintain constant contact with the developers, providing feedback on the testability of the proposed application and if necessary, proving risk reduction support for the validation of prototypes features as they are being developed and before they are “formally released” to the testing teams.
There is a range of different development methodologies available, we are experienced in the application of iterative based methodologies such as Agile, and/or sequentially based methodologies such as the Waterfall model.
During the testing phase, our test team verifies that the application complies with the system requirements defined in the initial steps of the process.
They also need to ensure that, even if this is not explicitly defined in the system requirements, the application will meet the expectations of our customer and all the other stakeholders that will need to support it throughout its lifecycle.
Our tests start during the development phase of the application’s lifecycle when our software developers run unit and integration tests on the developed code as part of their programming activities.
During testing, our test teams identify and report issues that need to be addressed by the development team. In cases where it is not clear whether the issues should be fixed (or even if there are bugs at all), our team call upon experts from other stakeholders to provide their input.
The development and testing phases end once the application reaches a quality and stability level that is good enough for release. This level is defined by you, the customer.
Our development philosophy is that it is not practical nor economical to aim for developing a “perfect” product.
By ensuring that all the phases up to this point of the application’s lifecycle (requirements, development, and testing) were correctly performed, the deployment and maintenance phases will be easier, smoother and as a result, less expensive.
Smart Releases
Each product type deployment has different attributes and specifications. We configure our releases in such a way that you can fully use their functions and so we can monitor their behavior in case we are required to assist you with any support requests.
Effective Maintenance
Maintenance is traditionally the longest-running stage of our ALM process, but it is also the stage where the participation of our testing and development teams is usually the lowest.
The effort we put into the previous phases has the benefit of effectively reducing the amount of effort required for product maintenance.
The application lifecycle ends with what we define as the retirement of the system at which point the users should stop working with the product and either upgrade to a newer version or migrate to a different product altogether.
Requirements Specification
Our application’s lifecycle starts at the drawing board, where you as the customer define what functions you need your application to do in order to support your business cases. This is our source for the creation of the system requirements.
Usually, these requirements, documented in the system specification, are shown as a hierarchical tree structure, where each node is a sub-requirement for its larger parent node.
We categorize each system requirement in the system specification (e.g., by module, feature, etc.) and prioritize them: what is a must, what can come later, etc.
Development
After the requirements specification stage is complete, the development of the application can commence.
Initially, our team sits together and breaks down the application’s system requirements into groups and development phases. This process includes all key stakeholders including representatives from the different teams involved: development, testing, product marketing, support, sales, etc.
The goal is to validate the system requirements against the customer requests, to ensure that the application being developed will answer all the real needs, as well as being easy to use, test and deploy.
During the development phase, our software and hardware test teams begin preparing their tests-cases and test environments ready for the start of the testing phase.
The test teams also maintain constant contact with the developers, providing feedback on the testability of the proposed application and if necessary, proving risk reduction support for the validation of prototypes features as they are being developed and before they are “formally released” to the testing teams.
There is a range of different development methodologies available, we are experienced in the application of iterative based methodologies such as Agile, and/or sequentially based methodologies such as the Waterfall model.
Testing
During the testing phase, our test team verify that the application complies with the system requirements defined in the initial steps of the process.
They also need to ensure that, even if this is not explicitly defined in the system requirements, the application will meet the expectations of our customers and all the other stakeholders that will need to support it throughout its lifecycle.
Our tests start during the development phase of the application’s lifecycle when our software developers run unit and integration tests on the developed code as part of their programming activities.
During testing, our test teams identify and report issues that need to be addressed by the development team. In cases where it is not clear whether the issues should be fixed (or even if there are bugs at all), our team call upon experts from other stakeholders to provide their input.
The development and testing phases end once the application reaches a quality and stability level that is good enough for release. This level is defined by you, the customer.
Our development philosophy is that it is not practical nor economical to aim for developing a “perfect” product.
By ensuring that all the phases up to this point of the application’s lifecycle (requirements, development, and testing) were correctly performed, the deployment and maintenance phases will be easier, smoother and as a result, less expensive.
Deployment
Each product type deployment has different attributes and specifications. We configure our releases in such a way that you can fully use their functions and so we can monitor their behavior in case we are required to assist you with any support requests.
Maintenance
Maintenance is traditionally the longest-running stage of our ALM process, but it is also the stage where the participation of our testing and development teams is usually the lowest.
The effort we put into the previous phases has the benefit of effectively reducing the amount of effort required for product maintenance.
The application lifecycle ends with what we define as the retirement of the system at which point the users should stop working with the product and either upgrade to a newer version or migrate to a different product altogether.
How We Integrate ALM in Your Project
Our Systems Engineers are focused on supporting you and are available to answer your questions
Project Management
We are experts in the installation, configuration and use of ALM Tools like Jira, Polarion, Jama, Doors, PTC Integrity and Tuleap to help you streamline your agile or waterfall-oriented workflows.
We connect the DevOps teams with the customer requirements to improve the development processes.
We plan, orchestrate, and track requirements effectively for complex systems across multiple project lifecycles.
We unify change management processes, task and issue change tracking and work reporting for all project contributors across your enterprise.
With our change management processes, we efficiently manage increasing levels of product change.
We manage functional changes by modelling and configuring the features using a structured approach.
We support the achievement of functional differentiation, detailing precise coverage of customer specifications, documenting individualized options, and support enhanced marketing opportunities.
We allow you to reach higher levels of reusability by using a balanced approach involving common elements, present in all product variants, as well as the use of overlapping elements, those shared by two or more variants of the product.
We implement comprehensive bi-directional traceability including all elements pertaining to the introduction of any substantial levels of change, making it possible to assess the impact of changes across the full spectrum of product variants, including the impact to the development artifacts and the workflows
Code Version Control
We are experts in the installation, configuration and use of version management tools like Subversion, Git amongst others. Our services include:
- We set up your repositories inside your project area;
- We track modifications within your project repositories;
- We run a history of changes to a baseline and help resolve conflicts when merging updates from multiple contributors;
- We link commits back to source issues, specifications and deliveries;
- We browse code differences;
- We assign granular, path-based access rights, on branches for both Git and SVN;
- We trigger Jenkins builds on commit;
- We set up email notifications to your commits.
Code Review
We are Experts in undertaking code reviews, our services allow you to:
- Improve internal code quality and its maintainability;
- Improve the quality regarding external aspects, especially its correctness, but also to identify performance problems, security vulnerabilities or injected malware;
- Help in transferring knowledge about the codebase, solution approaches and any expectations regarding its quality;
- Generate ideas for new and improved solutions for the specific code at hand and at a wider nonspecific level;
- Show compliance with QA guidelines.
Continuous Integration
We are experts in the installation, configuration and use of Jenkins to ensure continuous integration and continuous delivery as part of your project development.
We deliver you a build with:
- Full compilation;
- Documentation generation;
- Unit tests execution;
- Quality analysis on source code.
Test Management
We are Experts in the creation of Test cases, their automation and the management of their results in formal test reports.
We also coordinate the entire testing process for the Scrum process from initial stories to the final releases.
We create and maintain test case definitions in accordance with the defined requirements.
We create test campaigns using a collection of test cases and organize them based upon the product components.
We follow the test executions (Not run, passed, failed, blocked) and communicate any identified issues with the development team.
Document Management
We are experts in the creation, storage, linking and version control of product documentation.
We centralize project documentation in a single work area.
We complete document reviews in accordance with a preconfigured workflow.
We control which users can modify which document using access controls.
We check document histories to identify what changes have been made to a document.
We configure Webdav access to manage read and write permissions within the development team.
Collaboration
We help keep your team up-to-date with the activities of any collaborative third party teams and your customer by setting up and managing the connections between all the organization to synchronize project data using requirement engineering tools across your enterprise and those of your partners.
We develop our own customized connections to deliver features and flexibility which is not available from the off the shelf connections on the market.
Issue Tracking
We help identify bugs and issues in the project components.
We optimize and automate the relevant test cases.
We reproduce the bugs and issues.
We analyze the identified bugs and issues and investigate the best and most suitable solution.
We document the whole process including all relevant details.
