When you develop a product or application or software for a sizeable Salesforce organization, you work with an understanding that you have to meet their complex business needs. The requirements may span user-interface, integration with other processes, and custom applications within their Salesforce environment. As the environment becomes bigger, the development also needs to mature. If you take a closer look at this, you will realize that managing all these could be a problem in the absence of the application lifecycle management (ALM) process, which has to be there from the initial conceptualization of an idea to the end product.
You need ALM to understand requirements, to design, create and test the product, to resolve bugs, and to deploy and maintain it for its improvement. ALM is not the same as the software development lifecycle, which only focuses on the development of the product. Instead, it forms a part of the ALM process.
Three stages of Application Lifecycle
ALM includes requirement identification and designing, development, and monitoring and maintenance of the deployed product. Also referred to as governance, defining as well as designing requirements constitute an integral part of the application lifecycle. If you use SalesforceDevOps, you will mainly focus on planning and building phases based on various types of requirements concerning the business, compliance, and regulatory.
In this same stage, you will work on the application’s design as per the needs. Since a lot of the product success depends on this stage, you have to get things right here. The next is the development stage, where your idea takes the form of an application. DevOps helps you with testing and preproduction.
You build, test, and deploy a product in this stage and continue repeating the efforts until you are all set to release it. And, finally, you deal with operations and maintenance where you need to keep an eye on the product and manage it. The responsibility starts after the deployment has happened. DevOps include launch, configuration, and monitoring in this stage. Plus, you have to solve bugs and plan updates too.
The benefits of application Lifecycle Management tool
If you wish to deliver your product on time without any challenges with quality, then you cannot ignore the significance of ALM. From helping you to get the requirements right to meet them all, it comes in handy in every aspect. It also enables smooth development and testing of the product, while keeping all the teams involved in it. Since a robust ALM tool can cover the whole lifecycle of a product well, you should add it to your process for easy detection and traceability of the events. And for this experience, you can rely on DevOps.
Let’s check why using an ALM tool is critical for the development of a product and your business.
1. Release
With an ALM tool, you can release your product faster, which your customers would appreciate for sure. And if the device is right, you will not face any issue that can potentially delay its roll out in the market. It means you can expect a smooth experience in this area.
2. Quality
In an attempt to roll out your product faster, you may end up compromising the quality. Plus, the risk of overlooking a bug is also higher in such a scenario. However, you don’t have to worry about these things if you are careful with ALM. A trusted ALM tool will ensure that you release quality products and that too quickly.
3. Team integration
It can be challenging for teams to track a product during the development stage. But with the right ALM tool, you can get easy visibility into the process. You can easily trace the development and testing of the product so that you can keep up with the changes when required.
4. Audit
To take care of compliance, you need to make sure that the product meets all the requirements, and all the testing has happened. It will not be possible to prove it if there is no audit trail. That’s why ALM tools provide a traceability matrix in the development stage because of which you can check compliance issues along the process. Such provision removes a lot of tension as a result.
5. The contribution of DevOps to the ALM process
Developing an application may sound easy when it is not. Once made, it has to travel through the testing phase. You also need to calculate the time it would need to get started with production. Sometimes, it doesn’t take time to go back to development, and other times, you have to work on it multiple times. As a result, you can find it to be a never-ending process. To get rid of this hassle and to deliver the application faster, you need a tool like DevOps.
A combination of two words, “development” and “operations,” DevOps is a systematic procedure where DevOps and IT operation teams work together. It aims to reduce the application delivery lifecycle to help companies speed up their services. A business that uses a cloud platform can benefit from it. When using this tool, you will come across a set of different stages, including:
- Planning an application based on the types of requirements you have and conceptualizing the development process
- Coding the app following all the requirements and the initial plan
- Integrating codes to build the application
- Testing the application along the way and rebuilding if so needed
- Making the application live after successful testing
- Deploying the code in a cloud environment without affecting the website’s functionality
- Working on the code if required
- Monitoring the application to track its performance and make changes wherever needed so that clients feel happy
Today, DevOps is witnessing a massive demand in the market, particularly in the IT industry. If you want to stay ahead in the competition and ensure a smoother experience of application release, then it is probably the perfect solution for your needs. Just make sure you know everything about security controls to avoid any risks. When you use it the right way, there is nothing to fear.
