Using HCL Compass ALM

The application lifecycle management (ALM) packages and ALM schema provide out-of-the-box solutions for ensuring ALM best practices in your new or existing HCL Compass change management system.

The HCL Compass Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) packages provide you with a role-based process and security model that offers optimal performance with a collection tightly integrated record types that align with the roles most common in development organizations.

ALM is the coordination of development activities to produce software applications or components, and supports the lifecycle management of assets and their relationships. ALM helps facilitate processes for developing software that span multiple roles while managing all of the content that is produced by each role. It supports team members that may be distributed around the world who need to collaborate. The results of their work must be traceable to the originating request for change. Tasks are automated, and the work is governed to assure completion and quality.

For example, a requirement or product request can impact the design, development, build, and testing of an application. A change can impact every member of a team. Each role in a work process may produce content that contributes to the design, implementation and testing of that requirement. Understanding and managing the amount of effort involved to satisfy each requirement is critical for a team to be able to deliver on time or under budget. Project managers must ensure that requirements are implemented and tested with sufficient quality before a solution can be delivered. Software development teams must create artifacts (source code, requirement, or test case) and understand the relationships between different artifacts.

The HCL Compass application lifecycle management (ALM) feature is delivered as a set of two packages, or equivalently, as an out-of-the-box schema, with sample data you can start with by importing, and scripts that support the HCL Compass UCM integration and Project cloning.

ALM provides support for a variety of application development processes by facilitating role-based and data-driven process customizations. The comprehensive collection of supplied record types aligns with specific workflow roles and include the appropriate actions for that role. This support provides greater performance benefits and better enables parallel development for an organization's change management system.

By defining roles for a Project, and configuring types of Requests, Tasks, and Activities a user (who must be a member of the Admins record) does not change the schema but rather creates new records to an ALM project.

By using an ALM schema, all work can be organized by a Project and each change request represented as a Request. Tasks address Requests, and Activities are units of work that are worked on and completed to complete a Task. Parallel development is enabled by multiple Activities that can be associated with a Task. Each Activity can be assigned by a Role (such as Dev, Test, and Doc). The Request can be assigned to a team member based on Request type and a Role. Moreover, because a user may fall into one or more roles (such as submitter, developer, or tester), an ALM change management process allows for easier transition between the roles.

You can apply one or both ALM package types to an existing schema without impacting your current teams or record types. All ALM record types in this schema are prefaced with ALM to help distinguish them from other records in your current schema.