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Plan your application lifecycle management strategy

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Before you start your implementation project, you should plan your application lifecycle management (ALM) strategy with the Microsoft FastTrack team. A well-designed ALM strategy can help you deliver high-quality solutions faster and more reliably.

To help you plan your ALM strategy, the FastTrack team offers two workshops:

  • The ALM workshop covers the overall ALM strategy, governance, tools, and roles for your project. You should attend this workshop before project initiation or kickoff.
  • The Dev ALM workshop focuses on the development lifecycle and best practices for version control, build automation, and release pipelines. You should attend this workshop before starting development activities or as soon as possible.

These workshops are intended for project teams who want to align their development approach with typical best practices and meet the requirements of their implementation.

What you need for the workshops

Before you attend the workshops, you and your implementation partner should gather the required processes, tools, and teams for your project, such as:

  • Project plan template
  • Business requirement document template
  • Functional and technical specification templates
  • Test plan and test suite template
  • Defined tools, such as Azure DevOps template
  • Defined roles for partner and customer teams

What the workshops cover

The workshops can cover several topics, depending on your project needs and goals. Here are some examples of the subjects that the workshops can address:

  • ALM governance. This topic reviews your overall ALM strategy, Azure DevOps ownership, handover plan, and day-to-day activities. It also checks that you have implementation guidelines, best practices, and work items, such as project management, requirement, task, and bug management.

  • Build management. This topic reviews your version control, branching, code merging, and code review strategy. It also looks at how you automate and manage your builds and pipelines, and how you check in and deploy your customizations to nondevelopment environments.

  • Release management. This topic reviews your build tools, automated deployments, code and solution deployment, update strategy, environment configuration, and more. It also looks at how you apply hotfixes and service updates to production and nonproduction environments.

  • Multi-platform app strategy. This topic reviews your strategy if your project involves multiple Dynamics 365 apps, such as Supply Chain Management, Sales, or Power Apps.

When to attend the workshops

It's important to attend the workshops at the right time. Ideally, you should attend the ALM workshop before project kickoff, and the Dev ALM workshop before starting development or sooner.

You should complete both workshops either in the Initiate phase or when starting the Implement phase. If you attend the workshops too late in the implementation, you might have to do significant rework to follow the findings and recommendations.

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