One of our solution architects came up to me the other day and asked the following question:

“Our team is using TFS and doing ALM(ish) for a while now. How can I convince the rest of our company we should introduce it to all our application/product development efforts. Preferably in one catchy sentence or phrase on which I can build a presentation that is specific to our company and that does not need a 90 slide presentation to be understood.”

If you create and ship software you are already doing ALM. I’m talking about ALM 2.0 here if you will, the improved kind. The one with all those fancy things like an actual lifecycle :-).

At that moment I could not think of something from the top of my head. But the question intrigued me, so I decided to do a bit of Google-ing/Bing-ing/DuckDuckGo-ing. And it turns out there is quite a nice catchy sentence on the Microsoft ALM home page (which I made the title of this post).

I think its good because of the following things:

– It does not specify a discipline. Which I think is important if you want the entire company in on this. It just conveys something for all of us.
– It does not specify continuous- deployment/delivery. Lets face it, there is so much focus on these two terms that you would think no one made software for non connected devices anymore. Continuous value can be achieved without continuous- deployment/delivery.
– It does not specify a certain barrier. Of course bad communication is a popular one to mention, but focussing on this only makes the problem worse. Also good to know we want to get rid of the barriers of course.
– It does not specify a software development methodology. Don’t mention these things in a session where you want your company to see the value of ALM. If you use [insert your favourite SDM here] even as an example there is always someone who thinks: “If we have to use [insert your favourite SDM here] to do ALM, I’m not going to do ALM.”
– It does not mention the ALM tool. First you have to convince people to want to do an ALM approach. Then convince them [your favourite ALM tool] is the best tool for your company.

Disclaimer: I am by no means an ALM guru (yet)