Book excerpt: Beginning Application Lifecycle Management is a guide to an area of rapidly growing interest within the development community: managing the entire cycle of building software. ALM is an area that spans everything from requirements specifications to retirement of an IT-system or application. Because its techniques allow you to deal with the process of developing applications across many areas of responsibility and across many different disciplines, the benefits and effects of ALM techniques used on your project can be wide-ranging and pronounced. In this book, author Joachim Rossberg will show you what ALM is and why it matters. He will also show you how you can assess your current situation and how you can use this assessment to create the road ahead for improving or implementing your own ALM process across all of your team's development efforts. Beginning Application Lifecycle Management can be implemented on any platform. This book will use Microsoft Team Foundation Server as a foundation in many examples, but the key elements are platform independent and you'll find the book written in a platform agnostic way. In this book, you'll learn: What application lifecycle management is and why it matters. The steps necessary for implementing an ALM process. Tips and techniques you can use to gain control of your development efforts. How to implement an agile framework into your ALM process How to achieve traceability and visibility in your projects How to automate your ALM process