Explore how Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with the Power Platform will help you deliver world class business applications.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with the Power Platform focusses on the governance, development, and maintenance of business applications. Using this process enables planning, development, testing, deployment, operation and monitoring of deployed applications. This approach is becoming more necessary as applications built on the Power Platform are relied on more by organisations. Without ALM, organisations risk negatively impacting live environments or delivering poor quality applications. The ALM process ensures that organisations can accurately build to what the business needs with controls that ensure high quality, sustainability, and scalability without excessive cost.
The below Microsoft links provides more detail on the different stages of ALM:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/alm/overview-alm
Any organisation deploying application on the Power Platform should use multiple environments. This may not always be possible due to licensing however at a minimum an organisation should deploy a development, testing, and production instance of an application. These applications/environments should be shared based on the intended audience, e.g. a developer may have access to all environments whereas an app user may only have access to testing and production. The next basic step to take is packaging components into solutions. This groups application components together enabling for easier deployment to other environments.
When the above basics are used with source control and levels of automation are built in, organisations can start to improve productivity, reliability, quality and efficiency. risual uses this approach with Azure DevOps (ADO) to deploy solution automatically between environments using pipelines. This enables continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). More information about this approach can be found here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/alm/basics-alm
One use case for using ALM would be for the deployment of a Dynamics 365 product such as Sales. When deploying Dynamics 365 for Sales, organisations should consider their environment strategy. This could include different geographic regions, purpose, licence considerations and users. Once this strategy is created, the organisation can look to deploy ADO which will manage changes between environments using pipelines. If an organisation looked to extend the product using 3rd party integrations or integrations with Azure, these same configuration items can be added to the deployment pipeline. Not only that, using other tools in ADO, users can accurately capture user stories and acceptance criteria which will later support test scripts.
Azure DevOps (ADO) has been mentioned a few times in this article. ADO has seamless integration with numerous repositories and systems which will support the ALM approach. More information about ADO can be found in the below link:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/?view=azure-devops
