One of the more unfortunate aspects of application lifecycle management (ALM) is that most offerings want to lock developers into a particular set of tools, which is something that most IT organizations know developers are going to resist.
With that fundamental conflict in mind, CollabNet this week unveiled an open instance of its ALM platform that integrates with third-party tools regardless of where they are running, on premise or in the cloud.
According to Chris Clarke, vice president of product management at CollabNet, the CollabNet TeamForge Orchestrate platform is a unique extension of the latest version of the CollabNet TeamForge that gives IT organizations a truly federated ALM platform.
Given the open source heritage of CollabNet, Clarke says the company has been working toward building an open ALM platform that ties third-party tools into the metadata technology at the heart of the company’s ALM platform for years. The goal, says Clarke, is to create an ALM platform that allows IT organizations to apply governance to the application development process without forcing developers to only use tools that are compatible with a specific ALM environment.
Clarke says that advances in processing horsepower that power faster message queuing, coupled with Big Data document database platforms such as MongoDB, make it possible now for CollabNet to create an ALM platform that can produce cross-functional associations, visual traceability and social activity streams across multiple third-party tools, tied into the environment via a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs).
As businesses of all sizes come to appreciate just how dependent they are on software, there is a growing appreciation for applying some governance on top of a process that has been historically fairly free-wheeling. The challenge, of course, is finding a way to do that without scaring off all the developers who are the fountain of the creativity that makes developing software worthwhile in the first place.
