Joe Townsend sends a strong message to ALM tool vendors in his latest blog entry on CM Crossroads. He concludes with this summary:

To recap what I think needs to be done, I would like to see ALM tools that are a one stop shop and not a bunch of plug-ins resulting in a beast of several tools.  Real integrations no pointers or a blurb of data and make the administration as easy as possible so ALM practitioners can work on what’s really important.  If we can’t have one stop shops then let’s at least have seamless integration with different tools in the ALM Model.  Can someone please define what ALM is and unify the ALM concepts so we are all on the same page. This may be a tall order since you can rarely get 3 people to decide where they want to eat lunch at, let alone 10 or 15 vendors to agree what a concept is.

Since we’re in the business of providing real integrations between ALM tools and their deployment counterparts , high quality integrations are important to me. (Actually, is deployment part of ALM? He’s doubly right, the industry needs to define that better). Real integrations mean driving the behavior of tools from each other, collecting data from other tools, and pushing data to them. Continue reading →