Agile Application Lifecycle Management: Using DevOps to Drive Process Improvement

Integrate Agile ALM and DevOps to Build Better Software and Systems at Lower Cost

Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a comprehensive development lifecycle that encompasses essential Agile principles and guides all activities needed to deliver successful software or other customized IT products and services. Flexible and robust, Agile ALM offers “just enough process” to get the job done efficiently and utilizes the DevOps focus on communication and collaboration to enhance interactions among all participants.

Agile Application Lifecycle Management offers practical advice and strategies for implementing Agile ALM in your complex environment. Leading experts Bob Aiello and Leslie Sachs show how to fully leverage Agile benefits without sacrificing structure, traceability, or repeatability.

You’ll find realistic guidance for managing source code, builds, environments, change control, releases, and more. The authors help you support Agile in organizations that maintain traditional practices, conventional ALM systems, or siloed, non-Agile teams. They also show how to scale Agile ALM across large or distributed teams and to environments ranging from cloud to mainframe.

Coverage includes

• Understanding key concepts underlying modern application and system lifecycles
• Creating your best processes for developing your most complex software and systems
• Automating build engineering, continuous integration, and continuous delivery/deployment
• Enforcing Agile ALM controls without compromising productivity
• Creating effective IT operations that align with Agile ALM processes
• Gaining more value from testing and retrospectives
• Making ALM work in the cloud, and across the enterprise
• Preparing for the future of Agile ALM

Today, you need maximum control, quality, and productivity, and this guide will help you achieve these capabilities by combining the best practices found in Agile ALM, Configuration Management (CM), and DevOps. 

Robert Aiello is a consultant and technical editor for CM Crossroads, and is coauthor of Configuration Management Best Practices (Addison-Wesley, 2011). Bob has more than twenty-five years of experience as a technical manager in several top financial services firms where he had company-wide responsibility for CM and DevOps, often providing hands-on technical support for enterprise source code management tools, SOX/Cobit compliance, build engineering, continuous integration, and automated application deployment. Bob has served as the vice-chair of the IEEE 828 Standards working group (CM Planning) and is a member of the IEEE Software and Systems Engineering Standards Committee (S2ESC) management board. He holds a master’s degree in industrial psychology from New York University and a bachelor’s of science in computer science and math from Hofstra University.

Leslie Sachs is a New York State certified school psychologist and the COO of CM Best Practices consulting. Leslie is coauthor of Configuration Management Best Practices (Addison-Wesley, 2011). Leslie has more than twenty years of experience in the psychology field and has worked in a variety of clinical and business settings where she has provided many effective interventions designed to improve the social and educational functioning of both individuals and groups. She has a master’s of science in school psychology from Pace University and interned in Bellevue Hospital’s Psychiatric Center in New York City. A firm believer in the uniqueness of every individual, she has also participated in advanced training with Mel Levine’s “All Kinds of Minds” Institute and uses an eclectic style to blend different modalities into a custom approach for each client.