Apt – Application Lifecycle Management

Fujitsu, as a leading provider of enterprise cloud application services, has developed a new standard for delivering application services, speeding up project delivery, and helping to reduce costs and increase business value. We’ve devised a Lean approach based on re-usable best practice methods, proven ways of working, leading tools and solution patterns. What’s more, re-use doesn’t mean one size fits all, our approach provides us with the flexibility to match the right methods and ceremony to the specific needs of each project.

We sought an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) that would provide method automation, traceability, reporting and analytics, to synchronise development activities, and integrate practitioner tooling into a fully integrated multi-disciplinary environment. We required an ALM that was capable of marrying flexible and scalable methods with modern, best-of-breed tools, that could align with a wide variety of different customer requirements, whilst enabling consistent, measurable and repeatable approaches, and could be deployed across a global business.

Established ALM solutions tended to be tied to single monolithic methodologies, and would not provide the required flexibility and range, or allow us to tailor our response to our customers’ needs. As such, we chose to build our own solution utilising the best in commercial and open source tools.

Fujitsu chose a new aspect-orientated method from Ivar Jacobson that enables ways of working to be composed from a set of essential practices, and extended through codifying existing company best-practices. We developed integration between this and task management systems to integrate this method and to extend its core features to support large projects through improved management control.

The ALM methods & tools framework means we can deliver a Lean service that avoids waste whilst retaining the necessary level of rigour. A Lean process is the most appropriate process to achieve the required results; all the repeatable practices, techniques and process steps required to produce the results efficiently, safely and within quality norms, are followed, and no other. It was for this reason we decided the name for Fujitsu’s ALM should be “Apt”, meaning “strikingly appropriate”.