Your role in ALM
Your participation is important in the successful implementation of ALM on a project. While tooling helps automate the processes, the project team members must follow the processes that have been established. ALM will guide you through the process of working on the project. For example, if you’re planning to make a change, ALM practices would typically require you or someone to create a work item to track the change. That work item might require approval by a change control group to ensure that project scope isn't increased.
You’ll likely receive your work by reviewing work items that have been assigned to you. Then, you’ll be assigned to or will create a development environment to complete the work in. As you complete your work on a work item, you’ll update it to reflect its status. At the same time, depending on your processes, you might follow a process to commit your work to source control and get it ready for integration with your other team members’ changes.
These processes are important to follow because they provide consistent results. Consider a scenario where you have three environments: dev, test, and production. In that scenario, the testing team has found a problem in the test environment. It might seem as if the fastest way to get testing to work again would be to perform the fix directly in the test environment and bypass development. However, doing so would cause the problem to return the next time that changes are promoted from development to test.
ALM provides guidance to avoid this situation from happening again by ensuring that all changes are done in development and then promoted to test. Basically, the process will proceed as follows:
A work item is created to track the problem, and someone is assigned to the work item.
Development fixes the problem and then the work item is marked as completed and the change is committed.
An automated process promotes the change to the test environment.
After testing has completed, another automated process will promote the same change to the production environment.
This example describes a healthy ALM process that’s implemented by a team.