Application Lifecycle Management

Every enterprise-scale software program goes through a life cycle of planning, development, testing, and deployment in iterations, allowing customers to see what is being developed along the way and to provide feedback that effectively drives the quality of the software to their satisfaction. As a developer, you don’t just write code—you do many things in addition to writing code that align software development business needs. This is collectively called Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), and it includes the following tasks: 1. Participating in product planning. 2. Analyzing requirements to understand the conditions of customer satisfaction and breaking them down into deliverable tasks with specific estimates. 3. Architecting the software in different layers and modules that interact with each other. 4. Setting up environments for source control, build, and deployment. 5. Managing source code to ensure that correct versions are released according to the plan. 6. Writing unit tests to ensure that your portion of the work exhibits the desired behavior. 7. Analyzing code for best practices on performance and maintenance through Code Analysis, performance counters, and code reviews. 8. Building and deploying versions of the software for testing and feedback. 9. Instrumenting code to trace issues and to debug the code. 10. Communicating status and demonstrating progress.