Facilitating Life-Cycle Management

 

Facilitating Life-Cycle Management

ALM 11 automates workflow processes across multiple teams. HP also announced several new solutions to facilitate application life-cycle management. Some solutions, such as the "Sprinter" technology, are part of ALM 11; others, such as the enhancement of bringing together Performance Center and Quality Center, are done in addition to ALM 11.

The company simplified the process of making risk-based decisions of application releases with its ALM 11 Project Planning and Tracking capability. It establishes release criteria and manages milestones throughout the process based on real-time metrics, which give the user better, more accurate information to make decisions.

HP is also fostering greater collaboration among developers, QA teams, business analysts and security teams with prebuilt integration between ALM 11 and IDEs, which provide traceability across the life cycle and the ability to manage change.

In addition, the company is helping to support rapid application delivery with its Agile Accelerator 4.0, which manages Agile development projects with predefined workflows and configurations that significantly simplify development.

Agile Accelerator 4.0 reduces business risk from application failures due to functional, performance and security defects in composite and RIAs (rich Internet applications). The new product also automatically imports business process models into ALM's Requirements Management to visualize business process flows and augment textual requirements.

HP's ALM platform provides the foundation for the new versions of the company's Quality Center and Performance Center 11.0. These solutions help simplify and automate application quality and performance validation to lower operational costs, thereby freeing up investments for innovating applications in the delivery phase, according to HP officials.

The officials also stated that ALM 11 provides accelerated application deployment by automating manual testing activities (such as setting up data and manually driving repetitive tasks across multiple environments) with HP Sprinter; improves test creation with TruClient (part of HP's LoadRunner 11.0, which tests application performance without the need for time-consuming scripting); and reduces functional application defects in both GUI and non-GUI testing with a single automated solution for composite applications, called Unified Functional Testing 11.0  (a combination of HP's Functional Test and Service Test 11.0).

"There's a rationale behind what we've done with ALM 11," HP's Rende said. "This whole platform is all about accelerating the delivery of applications from a quality and performance perspective."

"This is one of the most exciting releases I have ever been part of because it fits where the market is now and where it's going," said Robin Purohit, vice president and general manager of BTO for HP Software and Solutions.

And customers agree. Todd Eaton, director of the CTO office at McKesson Corp., a provider of health care supplies and services, is "really excited" about ALM 11, particularly enhancements such as the combination of Quality Center and Performance Center, the new ability to test RIAs and Web 2.0 applications, and the new Sprinter.

In addition, with ALM 11, consulting offered by HP Software Professional Services enables clients to reduce the total cost of testing, mitigate risk with lower defect rates, accelerate implementation timelines, and increase software adoption through expert testing practices, flexible delivery models and education services, HP officials said.