1.2. Evolution of software engineering: moving to Agile ALM

Software engineering has always focused on improving quality and productivity. This may involve reusing well-defined requirements or software components. Many companies spend years developing applications and continuously extend their portfolio with new ones. By repeatedly implementing the same requirements instead of reusing existing assets (which exist because you’ve implemented the same requirements before) and not using strategies for tracking artifacts (such as builds, test results, packages), the development team will be ineffective and inefficient. Developing software in a suboptimal way leads to poor quality, missed customer needs, and late arrival to the market.

From a technical view, without any comprehensive strategy for managing artifacts, integration is often a game of roulette that involves changing an existing application rather than merely transferring a set of changes into another stable and well-known system state. This is why technology professionals have worked hard to improve the application-development process and have tried to find answers to these common questions: