People often get confused between the terms Software Development Life-cycle (SDLC) Management and Application Life-cycle Management (ALM). It is very common that the two are used interchangeably when they should not be. This is because the difference between the two acronyms (both associated closely with the life-cycle of software engineering projects) never gets highlighted well.
Wikipedia defines the two as follows:
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a continuous process of managing the life of an application through governance, development and maintenance. ALM is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.
The systems development life cycle (SDLC), or software development life cycle in systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, is a process of creating or altering information systems, and the models and methodologies that people use to develop these systems. In software engineering the SDLC concept underpins many kinds of software development methodologies. These methodologies form the framework for planning and controlling the creation of an information system: the software development process.
According to these definitions, ALM is a process which clubs business management with software engineering and hence manages the entire life-cycle, whereas, SDLC is a process that creates information systems and hence manages the development stage only. In SDLC the business aspect is not integrated in the process. SDLC itself needs management on case basis. The differences can be brought out more clearly in two ways.
Basic difference
At the outset, ALM is considered as a superset, one that should include one or more SDLCs for any system development or software application development. ALM is a process that starts from the very beginning – from definition of the application, till implementation, maintenance and application retirement. To elaborate this, let me draw an example from warehouse management for a company who provides digitalization service for all your important documents, accessible on-demand. At the back-end, this company will need a sophisticated physical warehouse storage system for safely keeping all the documents in files and folders.
In this case building a warehouse is the application and when this company decides to build the storage warehouse, the ALM process sets-in. Next, every type of document filing will need certain parameters for storage depending upon their utility and level of criticality. Each of these file storage systems can be seen as separate projects, requiring different models of SDLCs, depending on their specific deployment needs. These file storage systems together will form the complete functionality of the warehouse.
ALM engulfs all the smaller parts which come together to make the application work, and which need their own SDLC frameworks to be developed and deployed. Each SDLC (which by itself is a process and can be seen as components of the larger whole – the application) needs separate management. ALM oversees this entire process to deliver the end user value.
In short, the gamut of the ALM is the entirety of the application right from inception of its idea till its seamless functioning to deliver the end user value. SDLC Management is management of separate SDLCs. Hence ALM and SDLC Management can be defined more appropriately as follows:
ALM is a superset which wraps together the fragmented SDLC Management as processes, and integrates them ensuring delivery of end user value and maintaining the same.
SDLC Management is the management of the processes during the development stages only for different modules/components of the application.
Difference in phases
The second way of highlighting the difference can be by pointing out to the phases where ALM and SDLC Management play their roles. ALM is associated with the management of the entire life-cycle of an application which includes development phase (and therefore, SDLC Management also) along with other phases of application’s existence, such as maintenance and retirement. SDLC Management is associated with the management of the life-cycle of the development phase only of the application. Even if there is only single development project that has to be completed to develop any application, it will entail ALM as well as SDLC Management in its life-cycle.
Do you agree? Please share your opinions here and share.
awesome blog!
Thanks, Natachasteven!
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