Implementing Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for Power Platform apps is a crucial step towards ensuring the consistent delivery of high-quality solutions that meet the needs of users while minimizing risk and maximizing efficiency.
In this article, we will focus on the ALM Accelerator for Power Platform Apps that is already Generally Available (GA). Learn about how you can decide when to use it, about its advantages and more.
Power Platform Application Lifecycle Management
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a process that supports IT team delivery of consistent solutions. It’s a common process used in conventional development, and now it can be applied on Power Platform as well, improving the process in your organization in 6 steps (explained below).
Power Platform Automated Deployment
The 6 steps of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) process are shown below:
Let us dig a bit deeper into each one:
- Planning: In this stage, the requirements and goals of the project are defined, and a plan is developed.
- Development: The development stage involves the creation of the application using coding, testing, and debugging.
- Testing: Once the application is developed, it is tested to ensure it meets the requirements and is functioning properly.
- Deployment: In this stage, the application is deployed to the target environment, such as a production environment.
- Operations: After deployment, the application is monitored to ensure it is running smoothly and to address any issues that arise.
- Maintenance: This stage involves ongoing updates, bug fixes, and improvements to the application.
These phases form a continuous cycle in which each stage is built on the previous and feeds the next. The goal of ALM is to ensure a high-quality application that meets the needs of the users while minimizing risk and maximizing efficiency.
Power Platform ALM Accelerator for Power Platform Apps
The following flow chart has the purpose of guiding moving on to the ALM Accelerator for Power Platform apps based on your specific business needs:
ALM Accelerator Out-of-the-Box
The ALM accelerator comes equipped with a canvas app that simplifies the use of accelerator pipelines. With this canvas app, Microsoft Power Platform makers can execute intricate tasks using Azure Pipelines seamlessly, without having to switch between the Power Apps environment and Azure DevOps.
The ALM Accelerator for Power Platform complements the existing ALM guidance provided in the Overview of application lifecycle management with Microsoft Power Platform: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/alm/overview-alm.
The primary goal of this app is to provide an effortless and hassle-free method for makers to perform common development and ALM tasks. These tasks cater to multiple personas, including new makers, advanced makers, and team makers, and span across various organizations, projects, and repositories within Azure DevOps.
Some of the significant features of the canvas app include importing the latest version of a solution into the development environment, removing existing work that requires rebasing from source control by deleting a solution, pushing the latest changes from the development environment to source control by committing the solution, creating a pull request to review changes tied to a work item, and tracking the progress of moving changes between different environments.
View deployment history
By opening the detail pages of their project and selecting “>”, makers can review the deployment history of their project as shown in the following image:
Conclusion
With the ALM Accelerator for Power Platform apps, makers can execute intricate tasks using Azure Pipelines seamlessly, without having to switch between the Power Apps environment and Azure DevOps.
The canvas app provides an effortless and hassle-free method for performing common development and ALM tasks, catering to multiple personas, and spanning across various organizations, projects, and repositories within Azure DevOps.
This helps streamline your app development process and improve overall productivity, ultimately resulting in increased success in your digital transformation efforts.
Stellium is committed to helping customers define and implement a robust ALM strategy and DevOps practices for their Power Platform applications. Our governance services include defining policies, procedures, and guidelines for application development, testing, deployment, and maintenance. We ensure that these governance policies align with your organization’s overall IT governance framework and meet industry standards and regulations.
Contact us if you want need implementation support and training to help your team adopt the new processes and tools seamlessly. Our goal is to help you achieve a streamlined and efficient ALM and DevOps process that enables you to deliver high-quality Power Platform applications faster and with reduced risk.
Our company is highly skilled in providing Azure DevOps governance and defining a robust ALM strategy for Power Platform applications, crucial to establish best practices for development, testing, deployment, and maintenance of your solutions.
Learn more about the Power Platform services at Stellium here.
