Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Applying Application Lifecycle Management for the
Development of Complex Systems:
Experiences from the Automation Industry
Jukka Kääriäinen
1
and Antti Välimäki
2
1
VTT, Oulu, Finland
jukka.kaariainen@vtt.fi
2
Metso Automation Inc, Tampere, Finland
antti.valimaki@metso.com
Abstract.
In this paper we present an industrial study about the history of Ap-
plication Lifecycle Management (ALM) improvement in a case company. The
study is part of broader research with the aim to improve global development in
a company. The improvement of ALM started three years ago when the com-
pany decided to acquire a commercial ALM solution. Two SW teams develop-
ing different kinds of SW products started to pilot the solution and after various
steps ended up with fairly different ALM solutions. This paper concludes the
history and experiences of ALM improvement and discusses the reasons why
two teams ended up with different solutions. The improvement of ALM solu-
tions has been facilitated with the use of an ALM framework.
Keywords:
Application Lifecycle Management, Product Lifecycle Manage-
ment, Configuration Management, Agile, Scrum.
1 Introduction
The ability to produce quality products on time and at competitive costs is important
for any industrial organization. Globalisation forces companies to operate in a distrib-
uted development environment. Nowadays, companies are seeking systematic and
more efficient ways to meet these challenges. One response to these challenges is the
rise of so called agile methods, such as XP (Extreme Programming), SCRUM, etc [1].
Originally these methods were intended for local development teams. Recently, the
usage of agile methods in a distributed development environment has been under
active research, e.g. in [2, 3, 4]. In the literature and among tool vendors, the term
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has been discussed widely, for instance, in [5,
6]. In Stark's [6] definition, “PLM is the activity of managing a company's products
all the way across their lifecycles in the most effective way”. A PLM solution can
comprise various systems that are used to create and manage product related data,
such as requirements management (RM), configuration management (CM), enterprise
resource planning (ERP), computer aided software engineering (CASE), etc. Inter-
faces and application integration may be needed to enable these systems to work to-
gether [6]. Abramovici [7] estimates that in the future, PLM should better support the
