Over the last few years you've been hearing a lot of talk about Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and how leveraging the right tools and processes can allow your software development teams to deliver more functionality to your customers faster, with higher quality creating ecstatic users, reducing your company's costs and generating more revenue growth for your company. That sounds like a lot of hype, right? Well, since ALM has been a big buzz for a few years we decided it was time to do some digging and see what evidence we could find to prove that ALM done right can live up to those promises.
My colleague, Nathalie Feau, and I took some time to research publicly available articles, white papers, case studies, presentations and reports to see what companies have been saying about using tools like Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server as part of their ALM initiatives. We found many examples of how ALM done right has significant positive impacts on many areas of the software development lifecycle such as Agile Planning, Software Quality, Team Collaboration and DevOps. For example, Xerox IDC saw a 30% reduction in costs by retiring other development tools and also increased developer productivity by 40% by using the Visual Studio IDE with its built in integration with Microsoft's ALM tools.1 BMC saw individual team productivity go up 20-50%.2 Premium Credit Limited (PCL), a part of Bank of America reduced deployment costs by 50% while improving the speed of releases by 70%.3
We have taken this real world evidence of doing ALM right and built a work book that not only allows you to see the benefits of doing ALM right but, also allows you to calculate a projected return on investment when you use integrated ALM tools like Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
First, we tell the story of how ALM done right has provided significant savings for several companies. You can read the narrative that highlights how many companies have been able to become more efficient in their agile planning, improve their software quality, provide more meaningful collaboration amongst their team members and empower the development teams and operations teams to work together.
Take a deep dive into the Evidences found in the publically available articles, reports, case studies, whitepapers and presentations that were used to produce this document and create the ROI calculations. This data and information came from many different sources both from within Microsoft and from several sources outside of Microsoft.
Enter your Current Costs for areas such as your teams, development tools, deployments, quality assurance and cycle time into the highlighted cells on the "Current Costs" tab.
Go to the ROI Calculator tab to see the type of return on investment that you might see when doing ALM right with integrated tools like Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. We take the current costs that you enter and apply savings as a percentage based on percentages taken directly from the real world examples.
So that you can benefit from our research and efforts to put together this work book, we have made it available to you. Download your free copy of the "ALM Evidences and ALM ROI Calculator" work book from our web site. Now you can read through our summary and then dig deeper into the source information yourself. Next, plug in the current costs related to your software development lifecycle and then see what type of return you might be able to achieve by doing ALM right, just like the real world examples that we found.
To realize the goals of allowing software development teams to deliver more functionality to your customers faster with higher quality, creating ecstatic users, reducing your company's costs and generating more revenue growth for your company you too can leverage tools like Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. However, the path to achieving these goals with the same kind of return on investment as seen in the research that we compiled is not simply installing some tools and telling your teams to use them. It's not rocket science, but a little help can go a long way. The mission of Microsoft ALM partners such as InCycle Software, (a Gold ALM Partner), is to help you achieve these goals. Working with a Microsoft ALM Partner for things like planning, training and guidance will put you on a path to creating ecstatic users, happy employees, reduced costs and generating more revenue. Feel free to contact us today to start an assessment of your current ALM practices!
