Ovum names Polarion ALM a market leader in new reports

Application lifecycle management solution report and Agile project management solution report

Ovum reports on application lifecycle management

An ALM solution should allow three principal real-time benefits: traceability, visibility, and collaboration. For example, traceability allows a software requirement to be traced across the lifecycle – from definition, test case generation, design, modeling, code generation and test case execution through to final code release and deployment, with all linked back to the original requirement.

In an IT environment with a mix of tools, work item traceability is difficult to achieve. The lack of true lifecycle management hinders work, resulting in wasted effort and increased development time. This has led to some disenchantment in the field. Agile and DevOps revolutions have changed the tools landscape. The adoption of Agile processes and methodologies have led to a new generation of tools that provided ALM capabilities geared to support Agile styles of work. This in turn led to a new generation of ALM tools that support any development process from Waterfall to Agile.

Today we see the emergence of ALM solutions that are sufficiently strong across the complete lifecycle to allow organizations to standardize on one solution and to realize the benefits of ALM. This is a case where rip-andreplace makes sense for a large enterprise engaged in software development across multiple teams, across multiple locations, and with multiple suppliers and partners. The ability to transfer work sets across teams with minimum tool mismatch and friction allows projects to accelerate development and significantly reduce delivery time. For example, in manufacturing, modern vehicles and planes are reaching the market from initial concept at vastly reduced times compared to previous decades, and this is largely due to efficiencies that software introduces. Choosing the right ALM strategy to match the increased use of software in products further accelerates time to market.