ALM Octane 15: What’s New and What It’s All About

Predictable application delivery requires awareness of progress and alignment with goals and milestones, as well as the ability to access updated information without relying on error-prone manual data gathering. [4] 

The ALM Octane platform allows teams to assess the status quickly within their context and access the right data to make the correct decisions. When beginning a project or product development, and on a continual basis, the product owner creates and maintains the product backlog.

The Backlog is fluid, always adjusting to changing priorities. In ALM Octane, the backlog is maintained in the Backlog module (see Figure 1). In the Backlog you can:

• Create Epics that specify the large-scale part of your applications

• Create Features for each deliverable part of the product

• Create Stories for each item that must be developed

• Organise Epics, Features, and Stories in a meaningful way that displays your product development logic and hierarchy

Once you have created the product backlog structure, you can decide when to develop and release different items.

Business needs

Understanding business needs is the most critical piece of data any project team can have. ALM Octane has integrated Agile user stories and backlog management directly into the ALM software platform. Through this, teams can quickly document business needs and map them to supporting artefacts in the software development lifecycle, such as defects or tests. When planning a release or a sprint or development period, effective planning requires you to assign the correct amount of work for the capacity in these periods.

To help you determine and assign work accordingly, each team is assigned a sprint velocity, which determines the overall release capacity. In parallel with this, each story (user story, quality story, and defect) is estimated in story points. When you complete these estimations, you can better create optimal work plans for a release and sprint.

Build

Teams realise that a quick understanding of what went into a build and where to triage is an effective means to faster application delivery. ALM Octane integrates directly into your Jenkins CI and build environment (amongst others), so you can quickly view release and quality pipelines, as well as adjust as new or changing validations and regression tests are created.

Testing

Consistent quality is critical in any application being delivered to support your business. The ALM Octane platform allows you to author tests using Gherkin, assists in the conversion of automated scripts, and manages the execution of your test suites. You may also manually test by defining step by step. Whether you’re planning your tests within the context of a CI pipeline or executing regression tests on the fly, you can view aggregated quality within the context of your entire application.

Tracking

Whether you want to log a defect—quickly and easily—during a regression test, or review the status of a test or user story, ALM Octane provides information tailored to your context. Customisable reports, graphs, and dashboards help the team stay on top of critical items and with prioritisation. The dashboard is the control centre for analysis of your application’s development and quality. It gives a visual, customisable display of how the application’s development is progressing and the level of quality. When you add widgets, you can control the information shown in the dashboard such as the type of data reported, the scope, and time frame, and how the data is grouped and displayed. In one dashboard, you have complete visibility of all aspects of a project, release, or application—from progress to quality.

ALM Octane embraces open source standards and tools within the framework. You can author tests using Gherkin, support test automation management of Selenium scripts, which is based on a Git-architected back-end platform, and tightly integrate with your team’s Jenkins build environment.

To allow teams to provision workspaces and environments quickly, as well as simplifying the administration of the system, ALM Octane has introduced visual business rules. This helps teams to control access, enforce process and workflow, and to align with team priorities consistently. The most beneficial process assistance comes through productive guidance, rather than obstructive blocking.

ALM Octane runs in the cloud (AWS and Azure supported) or on premise. It consists of a database (Oracle or MS SQL Server supported) together with Elasticsearch running on Linux or Windows servers (VMs supported). As a web based application, it supports all the major browsers.

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