HP Updates ALM Suite To Improve Requirements Management 
HP is shipping an application management lifecycle platform designed to make it easier for business users to submit and track requirements to IT for new software and updates. HP ALM 11 comes as business users are requesting more visibility and control over business-driven requests for software projects or updates.
HP is shipping an application management lifecycle platform designed to make it easier for business users to submit and track requirements to IT for new software and updates.
HP ALM 11 is a role-based system to support all stakeholders and to better automate the ability to tie line-of-business requirements directly in with the workflow of IT software professionals who design, spec out, develop and test, Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Products at HP Software told IDN
“We built requirements management into our solution because business users are getting more active with requesting changes, and both IT and business need better ways to keep track of those.” Sarbiewski said. “The challenge today is to keep application updates on schedule but also keep risks down and find problems or bottlenecks as soon as possible. That takes the kind of collaboration platform we’re enabling.”
ALM 11 was designed to provide each IT and business stakeholder quick access to the information they need to speed up software projects and cut down on risk and misusing dev assets, he added.
- For business users, HP ALM 11 sports a Word interface that makes it easy to input requirements into the system. “Business users and business analysts are comfortable with Word, so we took the Word UI for the [ALM 11] requirements module,” Sarbiewski told IDN. “This way the business users requirements are directly in the same system the developers will use, not floating around in e-mail island somewhere.” The system is also capable of bringing in requirements from Excel, iRise and Blueprint, he added.
- For IT users, ALM 11 will work with apps from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and other popular publishers. It also integrates with popular IDE and dev environments, including Visual Studio, Eclipse and Collabnet.
ALM 11 features include:
- Project Planning and Tracking – To establish release criteria and manage appdev milestones throughout the process. The feature also provides stakeholders real-time visibility into release progress and readiness.
- 3-Way Traceability – To fill the loop between business and IT by allowing stakeholders to trace between requirements, development and quality artifacts for better analysis.
- Support for Various Methodology – Optimized to support all top delivery approaches -- waterfall, agile, hybrid and even custom based on enterprise practices.
“The challenge today is to keep application updates on schedule but also keep risks down and find problems or bottlenecks as soon as possible.”
Mark Sarbiewski
Vice President of Products
HP Software
Inside ALM 11’s Approach To
Automating Best Practices, Methodologies
HP ALM 11 is also designed to enforce best practices and the use of efficient methodologies, and includes a risk-based methodology for prioritizing requirements, Sarbiewski told IDN.
“There are so many levels of getting IT and business aligned, and maintaining alignment,” he said. “Even when you think you have both groups on the same page, there are just so many moving parts today. So, ALM 11 gets all existing resources, code, business processes, requirements documents and new ideas into a central place to coordinate processes across the whole team of developers and business users.”
To this end of coordinating between dev and business users, ALM 11 supports one popular methodology called release trains.
“Customers know that every 90 days they will do another release of a system,” he explained. “To support that, businesses prioritize a list of ideas for the update – including problems that need to be fixed, features that need to be updated or new features that need to be rolled out. IT needs to know which ones are important and business needs to know how complicated these requests are. So, this is a joint business-IT exercise.”
To set these priorities, each group answers some basic questions, such as: How many users will you have? How complex is this function or how long will it take? What is the consequence of failure?
Based on the answers, Sarbiewski said, the IT and business users get a better picture of the benefits and the risks of what they are trying to build, what benefits it will bring to the business and what resources will be required.
ALM 11 auto logs requirements and/or defects and provides associated metrics, data and comments.
“This means that a business user can track his project directly from the system, and see when it’s ready for him to test or review it?,” Sarbiewski said. “Or, alternatively, if he’s put in multiple enhancement requests and finds they’re still untouched after a couple of weeks, he can ask ‘What are you guys doing?’”
One early adopter is putting HP ALM 11 to effective use. “A large bank with a mix of internal and external dev teams uses HP ALM 11 with HP Quality Center as a backbone to manage and measure application develop status in 100 different ways,” Sarbiewski told IDN, “including making sure code aligns with requirements, testing and security for the applications.”
ALM 11 platform and software solutions are components of HP Application Transformation solutions. HP also offers other ALM 11 modules or plug-ins to address other aspects of software requirements-design-code-test-deploy, and include:
ALM 11 Project Planning and Tracking capabilities establish release criteria and manage milestones throughout the process based on real-time metrics. HP Quality Center and Performance Center 11.0 help simplify and automate application quality and performance validation to lower operational costs. The add-on HP Agile Accelerator 4.0 manages agile dev projects with predefined workflows and configurations that simplify projects. In conjunction with HP Quality Center and HP Sprinter, it can automate manual testing activities. HP TruClient can test an application’s performance without scripting.
