What is ALM?

ALM is a continuous process of managing the end-to-end lifespan of an application from concept through justification, requirements definition, work planning, architecture, UX design, development, construction, quality control, deployment, monitoring, maintenance, governance and eventual retirement.
ALM is the marriage of business management to software engineering made possible by appropriately configured tooling such as Microsoft Team Foundation Server (or the online/hosted version - known as Azure DevOps) that facilitates and integrates requirements management, architecture, coding, testing, tracking, and release management.
Team Foundation Server & Azure DevOps are by no means the only ALM suite, but they do offer a wide range of functionality, extended API and customization options that Gartner has recognized as a leader in a recent report “Magic Quadrant for Application Lifecycle Management, February 2015”. All this plus the tight integration into Visual Studio (and dozens of 3rd party tools such as Git, Jira, & Eclipse) makes it an intuitive and comprehensive tool set aimed at supporting every member of the team, and supporting the reliable delivery of world class applications. We have worked extensively with similar products from other vendors such as Atlassian.