Mature, Agile organizations over time, may find the need for an advanced tool. Although, for setting up an initial Agile team, we can use a few post-it notes and a board to get started, eventually, and depending on their scaling needs, most organizations will choose to adopt an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool.

These ALM tools are not specific to Agile framework, it just so happens that using an Agile framework as the foundation for your ALM tool makes the most sense. Based on the size of the organization, the distributed nature of the participants, and the level of governance, the need for establishing a single/common continuous process of managing the full life of an application becomes very necessary. A good ALM tool builds and nurtures interdependent relationships between the business and engineering using efficient tools that facilitate and integrate requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.

As part of our Agile coaching services, we offer ALM implementation services. Here is a quick list of ALM tools used by Torak in our various Agile engagements: Rally, VersionOne, TFS and JIRA.