Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
integration of multi-disciplinary products, not just mechanical or electrical products.
The concept “Application Lifecycle Management” (ALM) has emerged to indicate
the coordination of activities and the management of artefacts (e.g. requirements,
source code, test cases) during the software product's lifecycle. There is a belief that
comprehensive well-integrated ALM solutions are targeted for traditional plan-based
product development. However, Goth [8] states that recently, the market for ALM
tools for agile development is booming. The roots of ALM solutions are in the history
of configuration management (CM). CM solutions are usually the foundations of
ALM infrastructures providing storage, versioning and traceability between all lifecy-
cle artefacts [9]. In the development of complex multi-disciplinary products, ALM
has to fit into a wider frame of PLM. In these products, ALM focuses on the man-
agement of the SW portion of the multi-disciplinary product.
This paper presents the results from a study that has been carried out in an automa-
tion company. The study is part of broader research with the aim to improve distributed
development solutions in a target organization and study the concept of application
lifecycle management (ALM). The research has had two focus areas: product manage-
ment (PM) [10] and application lifecycle management (ALM) [11, 12, 13]. The contri-
bution of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, the aim is to present the history, current state
and experiences from the ALM improvement work. Secondly, ALM improvement has
been supported with an ALM framework that has been used for documenting and ana-
lyzing the ALM solutions of a company. The paper further specifies the ALM frame-
work by introducing the relations of the framework elements.
This paper is organised as follows: the next section discusses the development
lifecycle of complex products. Section three presents the industrial context and re-
search process. Then the history and current state of the solutions are presented and
lastly, the results are discussed and conclusions are drawn up.
2 Activities of Development Lifecycle
To understand the interfaces and the role of different information management sys-
tems during product development, the development lifecycle needs to be studied. The
following Figure 1 describes the simplified development processes of a complex sys-
tem and their related lifecycles [14]. From a product development point of view, PLM
should support this whole chain from product ideas to system release. On the other
hand, ALM is focused on supporting the management of the SW development portion
of this chain.
According to Crnkovic et al. [14], the process is divided into three main activity
types. First, the process contains common activities which relate to the system level.
These activities produce information that will be used at a subsystem level, such as
requirements, change requests and overall system design. Kotonya & Sommerville
[15] and Stevens et al. [16] state that after system level requirements specification,
architectural design divides and assigns system level requirements into sub-system
level entities which are further specified and divided into smaller entities. Sufficient
coordination and requirements traceability between these levels is needed to ensure
that all requirements flow from the top, through all requirements levels [17]. Second,
there are independent activities which relate to the different disciplines (e.g. HW and
