Continuous delivery

This is a very good post that goes beyond the "party line" and actually talks about the pros and cons of CD: http://agile.dzone.com/articles/continuous-delivery-vs

Update: good complement to this article: http://www.infoq.com/articles/test-automation-continuous-delivery

ALM Imperative

This is a great article on ALM: https://jazz.net/blog/index.php/2011/09/27/five-imperatives-for-application-lifecycle-management/

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the discipline of overcoming organizational silos to realize a whole-team, whole-view approach to the software delivery cycle by coordinating lifecycle activities across requirements, design, project planning, change and configuration management, build, and quality management.

The five imperatives for an ALM according to this article are:

• Maximize product value with In-context Collaboration to create a collective intelligence
• Accelerate time to delivery with Real-time Planning by riding the waves of ever changing project demands
• Improve quality with Lifecycle Traceability by surfing the web of linked lifecycle artifacts
• Refine predictability with Development Intelligence that helps you steer teams to successful, ontime delivery
• Reduce costs with Continuous Improvement

The key to Application Lifecycle Management is collaboration and transparency among all of the stakeholders, which is supported by an open, extensible, integrated platform.

Tasktop Sync

Taken from: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/09/tasktop-sync

Sync allows IT organizations to synchronize existing ALM servers to connect different artifact types like tasks, work items, defects, requirements and tests that are created during the various phases of a software development lifecycle process. Organizations that have different ALM stacks like HP ALM, HP Quality Center, and IBM Rational Team Concert can achieve traceability across the tools using the Sync tool.