What is ALM?
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the strategic process of managing a software or product lifecycle from initial idea through design, development, testing, deployment, and end of life. It enables software engineering teams to efficiently collaborate on projects using proven Agile practices and trusted up-to-date information.
Why is ALM important?
- Increased Visibility - Provide global, transparent access to the latest requirements, risk, and test data, ensuring teams are building the right software correctly.
- Enhanced Compliance - Control and monitor the use of mature processes across the lifecycle. End-to-end traceability simplifies compliance with safety-critical regulations, guidelines, and quality standards.
- Faster Deployment - Speed software delivery with Agile practices that streamline requirements, risk, and test management. Align development and operations teams using common, repeatable processes.
- Higher quality Products - ALM integrates quality management throughout the product lifecycle to improve product quality, safety, and reliability.
- Lower Development Costs - Reduce the cost of quality software by automating individual and team tasks, enabling reuse, enhancing focus, taming complexity, and minimizing rework.
Smart, complex products are multifaceted and complicated to design, build, and manufacture. Their formation requires the specialized expertise of product management teams, mechanical, electrical, and electronics engineering teams, and software development teams working collaboratively towards common goals. Application lifecycle management helps teams manage the inherent complexity of modern software development.
Most organisations are cutting costs by increasingly applying agile project management techniques to teams beyond the realm of software development, including marketing, operations, and hardware. Learn more from this ebook which focuses on Product Development Teams – Scaling Agile Development – Nine Blunders to Avoid
Explore ALM capabilities
Excellence in application lifecycle management requires mastery of the following:
- Requirements Management: Gather market insights and business needs to direct software engineering and align team members around a common vision.
- Software Development: Collaborate and automate to rapidly build quality software.
- Quality Assurance and Testing: Validate and verify results at each lifecycle stage to improve outcomes and reduce cost of quality.
- Development Operations: Create efficient, repeatable processes for successfully deploying and operating software. Plan and monitor software releases.
- Risk Management: Identify, analyze, and mitigate internal and external threats by focusing on the most important subjects.

Introducing PTC’s ALM Tools
Codebeamer
Codebeamer simplifies product and software engineering at scale, unifies requirements, risk, and test management with Agile, and builds on OSLC for PTC digital thread integration.
Windchill PLM software
Realize value quickly with standardized, out-of-the-box functionality across a comprehensive portfolio of core PDM and advanced PLM applications.
PTC Modeler
PTC Modeler integrates with the PTC engineering digital thread, applying and extending OSLC for high-quality models that automatically generate and synchronize source code.
PTC RV&S
Offers built-in software change and configuration management, and OSLC standard-based integration with the PTC engineering digital thread.
Pure Variants
Pure variants enable systematic reuse of assets across entire product portfolios, optimizing the development process, reducing time to market, and improving product quality.