One common request ALM instructors receive as students walk in the door on the first day of ALM training is, “How can I track application progress as it related to the project plan?” Understanding the bells and whistles that are available with ALM help students become more productive ALM users.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Project Planning and Tracking feature of the Release module allows the users and managers to track the readiness of the application as defined by milestones. After identifying and creating the necessary pieces, ALM generates a Scorecard, which is a grid of the milestones and the goals to be met within each milestone.
Milestones are part of a Release and have date ranges during which application features are complete. For example, Release 10.1 starts on January 1, 2013 and ends on January 31, 2013. A milestone is defined within that Release date range. A milestone may be named “Payment Processing Integration” starting on January 15, 2013 and ending on January 20, 2013. Milestones should be specific, significant and measurable — ensuring they are clear and meaningful to the stakeholders interpreting them. ALM will determine if the milestone was achieved on time. The ALM user then communicates that information to the stakeholders. Since milestones that take up too much time may lead to team stress or procrastination, it’s better to have more milestones with less content to achieve a sense of accomplishment as the project progresses.