Announcing the Top Rated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Tools for 2019

We are excited to announce the Top Rated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Tools for 2019! Top Rated awards showcase today’s top-of-the-line products in ALM based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. These awards make the voice of the market the primary decider into the industry’s best products.

Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are never influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer.

Here are the winners:

JIRA Software

JIRA Software from Atlassian is a popular agile project management tool supporting application lifecycle management (ALM) by providing issue tracking and a development roadmap, and configurable workflow for organizing and tracking task completion. For this, JIRA provides the familiar kanban or scrum workflows, as well as customizable task-oriented workflows allowing developers to pull elements as they need them to best match their project. On TrustRadius, JIRA Software is more frequently reviewed than any other ALM or Project Management tool, with a relatively strong proportion of reviews provided by users from large enterprises (40%). JIRA reviewers state that the product’s unique organizational schema such as stories and epics, and overall flexible workflow make it an ideal ALM tool for managing the work of developers and fostering collaboration among them.

“JIRA makes internal project communications, issue and task tracking, assignment and management out of email and Excel in some cases (I’ve seen few enterprises do it) a breeze. Our team now communicates about an issue via comments, upload files and this keeps discussions better organized… We are creating efficiencies that allow us to deliver more software products to more customers in less time, growing our business while maintaining excellence in our product.”

Bhargav Nanekalva | Development Lead | Internet

Jama Connect

Jama Connect supports the product development and requirements management facets of ALM. It provides live traceability to help product managers and developers understand the impact of change, and schema to visualize relationships across projects. Jama also supports QA processes by providing a platform to locate defects and understand their association to product requirements. On TrustRadius Jama’s reviewers primarily come from larger enterprises (70%), and work in all industries in many roles including IT, R&D, and QA. Jama’s recent reviewers praise the product’s core traceability and defect logging capabilities, and its overall superiority for the requirements management and QA side of ALM where projects are complex and evolve through multiple stages of development.

“Through Jama, we have been able to fully document our functional and technical requirements for multiple products/projects. Jama allows us to go through change cycle reviews with our client to show them the changes we have made during a cycle for their approval or clarification. This gives us accountability and traceability that could not be achieved in other more manual requirement gathering methods… For any project in which you need to document detailed requirements, especially software development, Jama would be well suited for use.”

Thai Trinh | Senior Business Analyst | Information Technology and Services

Congratulations to the winners of the Top Rated Application Lifecycle Management Tools Award!

What are Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools?

Application lifecycle management (ALM) tools are suites of software that support agile development with quality assurance (QA) and task management. There are a variety of specific ALM tools, often bundled into a suite. Some are project management applications specific to development and developers. These provide a platform to manage resources and provide oversight of tasks integral to the development of software applications.

Others provide a means of completing a specific subset of related tasks. Tasks subsumed under ALM are QA and requirements management, test management (e.g. for functional or performance testing, etc.), bug tracking, build automation, as well as change management and versioning. Some ALM tools help centralize these activities in a project space and provide a means of collaborating between resources and jobs on task progress towards completion.

Other ALM tools focus on one facet of ALM (e.g. test management, or requirements), and must integrate with project management apps for task management. ALM is not achieved without multiple products, and the integrations between them. Leading ALM vendors offer suites of interrelated apps and boast integrations with other products or dev tools that do what their own software does not.

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2019 Top Rated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Tools list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap as of July 1st, 2019. To qualify for the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Tools Top Rated Award, products must have at least 10 reviews written within the past year, a TRScore of at least 7.5 out of 10, and must receive at least 1.5% of the traffic in their category.  Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the TrustMap based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.