Introduction
The Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Workshop should be scheduled and completed during the implementation phase of the project.
There are templates for each of the Success by Design workshops, and you can download examples of the templates for this workshop and any others that you want to review.
Why ALM matters
ALM is a broad subject that covers management of the solution you're building. It also covers the processes and tools you put in place to reliably build, deploy, and maintain the solution.
It's important to plan how you'll manage solutions for your Power Platform and Dynamics 365 applications. This involves:
- building
- testing
- validating
- deploying
This workshop asks a series of questions, grouped into logical areas (build, test, release and deploy, run model, post-implementation, and storage) to ensure you're looking at all aspects and can provide the most prescriptive guidance.
With the information you collect, you can make targeted recommendations in each area based on previous implementation experience, generally available best practices, and identify potential areas of concern with your implementation.
Projects that don't have a solid ALM strategy can experience delays, unpredictable processes, and easily overrun their target dates and budgets because of a lack of governance and discipline.
A good starting point for understanding ALM with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform can be found by reading and reviewing the Application lifecycle management (ALM) with Microsoft Power Platform docs page.
ALM components covered
Because ALM is a such a broad subject, the ALM workshop focuses on the key areas that can bring the most benefit and reduce the most problems on a project. Here are the subjects that are covered in the ALM workshop.
General strategy
A general understanding of your development and deployment approach both for the implementation and post go-live. This includes developing your strategy for managing changes using solutions.
Use this to frame and to look at the other subjects in this review and ensure that the details will support the development strategy you provide, identifying any challenges or risks along the way.
Build plan
This topic is where we explore the infrastructure component of how you plan to manage the building of solutions using multiple environments (DEV, QA, UAT, INT, PROD, and so on).
If you are having multiple developers working in the environment, what approach will you take to support this design? Multiple development environments? How will they synchronize?
Test strategy
This topic is where we explore what type of testing is planned and how it will be integrated into the overall ALM process.
Release and deploy
In this topic area, we look at how you'll be packaging assets and transporting them from one environment to another. The complexity of the deployment process should also be considered here, and anything that could be done to increase simplification. Also included is review of preparations for deployment such as testing and performance optimization.
Run model
This topic is where we look at your process for deploying bug fixes and servicing what you have deployed. Since this also includes a longer-term perspective, we look at how you'll handle testing weekly updates and larger upgrades twice a year.
Capacity management
In this topic area, we look at the capacity usage of storage and API requests. Specifically, you're looking to ensure that you're optimizing the best use of capacity you have and planning for monitoring of capacity consumption on an ongoing basis.