HP Application Lifecycle Management (HP ALM) is a set of software tools developed and marketed by Micro Focus for application development and testing. It includes tools for requirements management, test planning and functional testing, performance testing (when used with HP Performance Center), developer management (through integration with the most widely used developer environments such as Collabnet, TeamForge and Microsoft Visual Studio), and defect management.
ALM is designed to support key stakeholders responsible for delivering applications as they progress through their lifecycle. It is a combination of a common platform, several key applications and a dashboard targeted at managing the core lifecycle of applications, from design through readiness for delivery to operations. All of these core lifecycle activities are connected together from a workflow perspective with a common management console, layer of project tracking and planning and built on a common software foundation containing a consistent repository and open integration architecture with a supported SDK.
ALM is intended to provide Information Technology departments with a centralized application management platform for managing and automating within and across application teams and throughout the complete process of developing an application, within a single workflow. HP offers a number of consulting services to support ALM.
Components of HP ALM
Project planning and tracking
ALM provides project planning and tracking so application development solutions teams can define, track, measure, and report on project milestones and key performance indicators.
Application lifecycle intelligence
ALM delivers real-time traceability of requirements and defects. QA department can significantly benefit from this traceability to get on-time reports and have visibility into the system under development
Lab management automation
HP lab management capability allows testing teams to provision and deploy a test lab themselves in a hybrid delivery environment (bare-metal or virtual, in-house or in the cloud) through integration of HP ALM with HP Continuous Delivery Automation (CDA).
Asset sharing and re-use
ALM supports sharable asset libraries that can be reused across projects while maintaining traceability. Specific changes can be applied to shared assets for each project while maintaining library integrity, and projects can re-synch with the library as needed. Cross-project defect collaboration is also supported.
Cross-project reporting
ALM provides cross-project reporting and pre-configured business views for reports such as aggregated project status metrics, application quality metrics, requirements coverage, and defect trends for both an enterprise release and individual projects.
HP Enterprise Collaboration
HP Enterprise Collaboration uses social media for application development teams to communicate without leaving the HP ALM environment. Users can import relevant objects (defects, incidents, reports) for participants to review and comment on.
HP Performance Center
Performance Center software is an enterprise-class performance testing platform and framework. The solution is used by IT departments to standardize, centralize and conduct performance testing, as well as reuse previous test cases. Performance Center finds software code flaws across the lifecycle of applications. Built on HP LoadRunner software, HP Performance Center supports developer testing and integrates with HP ALM.
Quality assurance
ALM includes quality assurance features for risk-based test planning and management, version control, baselining, quality release and cycle management, test scheduling and execution, integrated manual testing and defect management.
HP Quality Center is a quality management platform that can be used for a single project or across multiple IT projects to manage application quality across the entire application lifecycle. The solution provides requirements management, release and cycle management, test management, defect management and reporting from a single platform.
Requirements definition and management
ALM is used by IT departments to capture, manage and track requirements throughout the application development and testing cycle.
Fortify security
Fortify security software, from Fortify Software, provides application security software, including both dynamic web application security testing and static code analysis. HP Fortify security software integrates with ALM secure application delivery.
Multi-environment support
ALM can be installed on-site or delivered through the cloud in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. HP ALM is also available for mobile device support, including Apple iPhone and Android mobile devices.
See also
- Application lifecycle management
References
External links
- Micro Focus Application Lifecycle Management Web page
- Micro Focus Quality Center Web page
- Micro Focus Performance Center Web page
- HP ALM Help Center
- Micro Focus Marketplace
