HP Expands Application Lifecycle Management Tool Set

ALM provides a central application management platform and workflow that speeds the application development process by keeping track of all its moving parts. It's a technology of growing importance for companies that build and use cloud applications, which typically weave together multiple IT services to support business processes.

HP released its ALM 11 suite last November and is now updating the suite with new features and functionality. One is Application Lifecycle Intelligence (ALI), which keeps track of changes that developers are making to source code during the application-building stage to ensure that no defects make their way into the final release.

"ALI gives you a real-time assessment of the risks as your multi component application is being developed," said Kelly Emo, director of product marketing for applications in HP's Software business unit, in an interview.

ALM stacks used to be single-vendor offerings, but open source code management technology has helped to make the modern ALM stack more heterogeneous, Emo said. ALI builds on this by enabling the various development teams associated with building an application to use the development tools of their choosing.

This means that for a complex composite application such as order management, the team building out the login component could use one set of tools, while another team building the customer records component could another set of tools, according to Emo. "With ALI, we can pull in information from the different tools, roll it up into a single set of requirements, and show a complete change impact report," she said.

Another challenging aspect of cloud applications is that updates need to happen much faster and more frequently than in the past. If you have a single application and single team of testers and developers, it's not difficult to manage fast paced iterations using traditional mechanisms. But many HP customers find themselves dealing with multiple applications and teams.

To help them keep pace, HP is offering Agile Accelerator 5.0, a scheduling tool that offers a continually updated view of the progress of application development deliverables. Emo said it's a reflection of the fact that many HP customers have embraced the Agile software development methodology.

"It gives you a real time view of the status of an application, what you're building, what has been developed and whether there is a backlog," said Emo. "In the Agile layer, what you see is a real time status of who has done what. It's about visualization in the context of processes that Agile is used to receiving."

Another issue software development companies often run into is performance testing. Internal IT isn't thrilled about allowing their production servers to be used during these tests, and it's expensive to test application portions that touch external service providers. HP's new Service Virtualization 1.0 lets developers virtualize parts of their environment for testing purposes.

"We model the core behavior of the application to see how the application responds under heavy load, and we give the customer dials that they can turn up and down for stress and functionality testing," said Emo.