Successful management of the application lifecycle can bring plenty of benefits to an organization. Application lifecycle management (ALM) includes a number of goals that each development group can further define:

• Improve quality. Complexity tends to breed bugs, but you can keep quality to acceptable levels and even improve it by managing quality assurance throughout the application lifecycle.
• Reduce development time and cost. The holy grail of software development is to meet both time and cost budgets. Few projects do—a major reason why so many projects fail.
• Support collaboration. Any non-trivial application requires collaboration between multiple people, so lifecycle management tools must encourage communication and sharing.
• Support flexible processes. No development team exactly matches any other, and each must develop processes that suit its culture. Tools must adapt to different processes, not the other way around.
• Reduce maintenance time and cost. Development costs aren't the only major cost of an application; in fact, they might be one of the smallest. Keeping the application running and current over a period of years requires careful management. That's the only way to make an application's net present value reasonable.