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Magic Quadrant for Application Development Life Cycle

Management
09 February 2015 | ID:G00262969
Analyst(s): Nathan Wilson, Jim Duggan, Thomas E. Murphy, Maritess Sobejana, Joachim
Herschmann

Summary
The push to speed up the pace of delivery is increasing the focus on agile and DevOps
practices in application development life cycle management. We evaluate ADLM providers
to help application development managers and other IT leaders select appropriate
technology partners to meet this challenge.

Market Definition/Description
This document was revised on 7 July 2015. The document you are viewing is the corrected
version. For more information, see the Corrections
(http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/policies/current_corrections.jsp) page on
gartner.com.
The application development life cycle management (ADLM) tool market focuses on the
planning and governance activities of the software development life cycle (SDLC). ADLM
products focus on the "development" portion of an application's life. This year, we changed
our criteria to more strongly weigh the support for agile development and DevOps. This
negativity impacted the positions of some vendors that are focused on traditional and
system development.
Key elements of an ADLM solution include:
Software requirements definition and management
Software change and configuration management
Software project planning, with a current focus on agile planning
Work item management
Quality management, including defect management
Other key capabilities include:
Reporting
Workflow

Integration to version management

Support for wikis and collaboration
Strong facilities for integration to other ADLM tools
Few of the vendors offer all of the capabilities listed above. This research contains several
best-of-breed vendors that offer top-notch solutions for portions of this functionality. This
makes it especially important to consider the fitness of a vendor for a specific use over the
relative position in the Magic Quadrant figure.

Magic Quadrant
Figure1.MagicQuadrantforApplicationDevelopmentLifeCycleManagement

Source: Gartner (February 2015)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Atlassian

Atlassian
Consider Atlassian when looking for a comprehensive solution for running agile or
traditional projects, and when you have limited needs for proven portfolio-level
functionality. The Atlassian solution has a strong focus on task management, including
defect tracking, work-item management and collaboration, and invests heavily in
integration features. The vendor offers its solutions on-premises and via SaaS. However,
some extensions are only supported in on-premises installations. A mid-2014 launch of
Jira Portfolio (not covered in this research) may address previous limits in portfolio-level
functionality.
STRENGTHS

A large customer base from the vendor's Jira issue management solution drives a
strong third-party market.
Collaboration features via HipChat and Confluence extend market reach beyond the core
application development team.
Solid support for Git and continuous integration positions Atlassian well for
organizations adopting DevOps practices.
The Marketplace offering includes many add-in functions, enabling Atlassian to focus on
the core functions while supporting diverse use cases via partners.
CAUTIONS

Atlassian provides focused technical support services for large enterprises, but does not
have the dedicated account executives that characterize traditional direct selling
enterprise software vendors. Some customers report that they miss traditional account
executives, and find that contract terms can be inflexible and poorly defined at times.
While there are a lot of integrations, import and export functionality is poor.
While improvements have been made, some customers report challenges managing
multiple instances and moving between on-premises and cloud, hindering efforts to
expand ground-up adoption to an enterprise solution.
Mobile support is still emerging.

Borland
Consider Borland (a Micro Focus International company) when looking for a solid set of
tools covering the core functions of ADLM. Borland's product line is well-integrated across
the life cycle, with a focus on change management and traceability. While StarTeam has
strong agile planning capabilities, product visibility in this space has been poor. The
addition of AccuRev to the product set improves capabilities and integrations with Git, but
is still in the process of being integrated with the older application and creates overlap
with StarTeam. Core functions in requirements, quality and change management are
mature and flexible.
STRENGTHS

The core functions for requirements, change management and quality management are
very rich, and the products are proven to scale.
There is good customer support and connection to technical teams to aid in the
implementation of products and customer-driven product evolution.
The product supports agile, iterative and waterfall development, including the ability to
run mixed-methodology projects.
The acquisition of AccuRev allows Borland to offer a choice between several strong
software change and configuration management (SCCM) solutions.
CAUTIONS

Product documentation is inconsistent, leading to challenges with product configuration

and adoption.
Despite improvements in newer offerings, some of the legacy ADLM products
(StarTeam, Silk Central and Caliber) still do not currently have a consistent integration
API, look and feel, or platform support.
There is limited support for emerging agile and DevOps trends.
Borland continues to lack support for SaaS delivery, and most tools are aimed at
Windows or Linux-based developers.

CollabNet
Consider CollabNet if you want to implement open-source-style development in your
organization. Although the product line is relatively small, with four core products, some
product elements overlap; users note that the tools deliver ease of use while also scaling
to support very large organizations. CollabNet's support of distributed version control
system (DVCS) integrations solidifies its coverage from an enterprise perspective. This
strength, along with solid training capabilities, is helping the vendor replace other legacy
tools in user landscapes.
STRENGTHS

CollabNet has a large customer base and proven scalability, and has shown a strong
ability to execute on acquisitions to adapt to market changes.
The various CollabNet products have broad support for open-source distributions,
including its Subversion (SVN), Git, Gerrit and Jenkins, and integration to Black Duck for
identifying reused code and aiding in license compliance.
TeamForge provides a single integrated environment supporting planning, execution,
change management and collaboration.
Tracker functionality and integration support is strong, enabling traceability and mixedtool use.
CAUTIONS

Acquisitions have created overlaps, which are being reduced with incremental migration
to TeamForge.
CollabNet lacks a direct presence in South America. It lacks some of the traditional
enterprise licensing that large-scale users are accustomed to, and user management
has been a challenge for users.
While CollabNet delivers in an agile fashion, some releases lack expected levels of
quality and finish.
While recent funding has given CollabNet the resources to catch up with the Leaders in
this Magic Quadrant, those resources have not yet translated to higher revenue growth.

Hansoft
Consider Hansoft if you are looking for an ADLM solution that strongly addresses the
challenges involved in managing product delivery in large agile or mixed-mode projects. Its
history and expertise in game development have allowed Hansoft to deliver one of the best
mixed-model development planning and execution solutions available in the market. Its
solution primarily appeals to companies in product development industries, such as
gaming, electronics, aerospace and defense, telecom, and the like.
STRENGTHS

The vendor has strong planning and project management facilities, including project
portfolio support. Hansoft also has the ability to work with varied project management
styles.
Building from its background and experience, Hansoft has taken a strong position to
support the mixed-mode development common in product development industries.
The product offers localization in Japanese, Chinese and Korean to support distributed
teams. It is proven to scale with multithousand concurrent user installations.
Customers consistently cite product performance, flexibility and ease of use as
strengths. Users also note that customer support and interaction are strong.
CAUTIONS

Hansoft's focus on mixed-model development reduces its attention on pure agile and
DevOps practices.
Hansoft's solution does not cover the full breath of ADLM functions. It lacks the
software configuration management component, but provides third-party integrations
that include integration with Perforce, Git and Atlassian's Jira.
The vendor has moved to support organizations using the Scaled Agile Framework
(SAFe), but large-scale customers find this capability not fully understood and
supported.
Customers have noted new features that have been added to the product, but have also
noted the lesser attention given to bug fixes.

HP

HP
Consider HP if you seek a comprehensive portfolio of integrated products spanning
software quality suites and ADLM. HP's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) offering
works seamlessly as a part of its market-share-leading software quality suite, providing an
integrated and comprehensive solution across these two functional areas.
STRENGTHS

A combination of ADLM and quality functionality provides an unusually comprehensive

solution, with strengths in traceability and change management.
HP has a dominant position in the software quality market and a very strong analytics
platform.
HP's Application Lifecycle Intelligence (HP ALI) offering provides a strong artifact
repository and a solid set of integrations, as well as a well-designed integration API set.
The vendor has proven scalability and a strong partner network, providing enhanced
functionality and implementation support.
CAUTIONS

Existing customers have found themselves torn between the complexity of upgrading
customized on-premises installations and the need to get new releases to gain features
and browser support.
Customers report that installation and adoption can be challenging. HP has shown some
progress in making this easier.
Clients interviewed were frequently critical of the product's support for agile processes
and best practices. There is little evidence yet of the adoption of its DevOps features.
Adoption seems strongest in the existing HP installed base. HP ALM does not appear
frequently in Gartner's reviews of shortlists for new ADLM purchases.

IBM
Consider IBM when you are looking for a broad portfolio of technology products and
services spanning methods, platforms and delivery types, from system engineering to
traditional IT applications. With good support of waterfall, iterative and agile
methodologies, IBM can be a good choice for bimodal organizations looking for a single
ADLM solution for all teams. Its products have made strong strides during the past few
years in UI consistency, removing some overlap and improving ease of use. Bluemix and
other license changes provide increased flexibility in pricing and contracts.
STRENGTHS

IBM has a large, comprehensive suite of ADLM products covering the full life cycle, and
a strong position in supporting DevOps practices.
IBM has the ability to scale to meet the needs of large and complex technology and
business transformation initiatives in any global region via IBM Global Business
Services.

The vendor's tools accommodate legacy product users in product road maps, providing
support and transition paths.
The vendor's tools for both IT and system development are well-positioned for the
Internet of Things (IoT).
CAUTIONS

Despite some improvements, IBM has a comprehensive and complex product line that
complicates contracts, adoption and decision making. This issue is most significant in
legacy products and is less of an issue for newer solutions.
A complex, overlapping product line increases per-seat costs. Token pricing simplifies
licensing, but some clients report limited cost savings.
IBM's products can involve a steep learning curve, and high installation and startup
costs. Installation and management costs can be reduced by using the vendor's cloudbased solutions.
The speed of overall product innovation may lag behind less diverse companies in the
short term, because IBM must accommodate a diverse installed base and legacy
products.

Inflectra
Consider Inflectra when looking for a solid integrated, affordable set of solutions for
managing traditional project and program information, from department to enterprise
levels. Although the core products SpiraTest and SpiraPlan are an integrated suite
offered in bundled form as SpiraTeam, they are designed with an open architecture
supporting integration to competitive products. The tools are available either as licensed
installations or SaaS.
STRENGTHS

Inflectra offers an integrated suite, with many integration options to partner tools.
The vendor delivers feature-rich planning and management in a single-product
architecture.
Product adoption is benefited by simple deployment, together with reasonable pricing.
Customers also note that the vendor's products are easy to learn.
Customers report that Inflectra's support and responsiveness are very good.
CAUTIONS

Inflectra has not proven its products on an extremely large scale. The vendor's largest
implementation has been for 1,000 concurrent users.
The vendor has completed a limited number of product integrations.
Although the product is well-integrated, it is challenging for customers to share artifacts
across projects.
The vendor offers limited support for agile methodologies.

Jama

Jama
Consider Jama's offering if you need to support ideation and requirements workflow in
product-centric delivery organizations that already have solutions for project planning and
execution. Jama's product drives traceability from requirements to validation, with support
for planning and management of tests. The focus of the vendor has been on ease of use
and collaboration, and a key capability is the Jama Review Center functionality.
STRENGTHS

Jama offers a strong solution in requirements management, including traceability to test

management and product delivery.
The vendor delivers ease of use that is apparent in viral adoption in requirements
management, an area that has often failed to overcome the incumbency of Microsoft
Office.
Often, tools around requirements management readily become shelfware, but Jama
seems to have broken that mold.
Jama provides strong support for collaboration across teams, including connecting
people who are not "on the system." This drives resolution and management of both
what is being built and the overall change process.
CAUTIONS

The product does not provide full coverage of ADLM functions, but does provide
integrations to perform these functions, including to Microsoft Team Foundation Server
(TFS), Atlassian Jira, Rally, HP Quality Center and IBM Rational Doors.
Some current customers have expressed a desire for stronger reporting functionality.
There is a lack of transparency regarding the vendor's product pricing models.
The collaboration model can yield a high volume of email messages (this option can be
turned off).

Microsoft
Consider Microsoft if you are heavily invested in the Microsoft development ecosystem.
The vendor offers a broad suite of functionality available either on-premises or in the
cloud. Growing support of open-source technologies and community participation aides in
opening up the tools for a broader set of platforms. With strong support for project-level
agile, Microsoft can handle almost all your needs to manage a .NET development process.
STRENGTHS

The vendor has a clear strategic direction, and offers ADLM functionality that is easy to
implement.
The Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) provides a significant pool of training
materials and access to software.

Microsoft frequently rolls out additional and enhanced functionality in an agile fashion
via SaaS, but uses a less frequent cadence with on-premises installations to avoid
disruptions.
The vendor understands agile principles better than most of the integrated ADLM suite
vendors.
CAUTIONS

Despite credible support for other platforms, Microsoft struggles to penetrate

development organizations outside of the .NET world.
The shift toward mobile as a dominant platform presents an opportunity for competitors
to undermine the "all-Microsoft" approach.
The vendor lacks a stand-alone requirements management approach. Instead, it takes
an enhance-and-integrate Office approach, as well as relying on partners (e.g.,
eDevTech's 4TFS product line).
Microsoft lacks the agile depth of pure-play vendors around the enterprise agile
capabilities of project portfolio analysis, and support of SAFe.

Parasoft
Consider Parasoft if you are looking to augment your ADLM solution with tools to enhance
early defect detection. Parasoft tools can also enable compliance with a number of
standards, including U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Motor Industry Software
Reliability Association (MISRA) and Payment Card Industry (PCI), by offering traceability
and defect prevention. The vendor also provides metrics for measuring compliance with
SLAs in outsourced development. Much of this support comes in the form of tools to aid in
development testing and source code analysis. Parasoft's Process Intelligence Engine
helps to collect and analyze data to identify business risks.
STRENGTHS

Parasoft's tools provide strong support for compliance for several industry standards.
Its product set brings metrics- and policy-driven decision making to continuous
integration practices, to drive quality improvement and reduce risks in continuous
delivery.
The vendor's product complements many ADLM and quality management solutions, with
strong solutions in early defect detection.
Parasoft offers service virtualization and lab management functionality to assist in
automated testing.
CAUTIONS

Parasoft does not cover all ADLM functions; it has a limited focus on controlling risk
through development testing, a policy-driven approach to quality and an open integration
platform.

Due to its focus on the specific needs of compliance-driven/safety-critical organizations,

customers will need to integrate the Parasoft offering with other ADLM tools.
Clients report challenges with product upgrades and complex licensing.
A strong focus on regulated and compliance-driven quality approaches puts some
limitations on agile organizations.

Polarion
Consider Polarion when you are focused on product delivery and system development, and
seek a strong, single-platform toolset that covers the entire life cycle, and promotes
traceability and compliance with International Organization for Standardization (ISO), FDA
and many other standards. Polarion is also certified by Technischer Uberwachungsverein
(TUV). The platform supports highly collaborative team development with agile and
traditional approaches.
STRENGTHS

The single integrated product offers flexible workflow and support for large distributed
teams.
Polarion's unified platform supports mandated process compliance and a strong model
for traceability, simplifying reporting. It has created strong integration capabilities for
round-trip requirements to Microsoft Word, which enables users outside the system to
participate in the review-and-acceptance process, and overcomes a traditional barrier to
requirements management tool adoption.
The vendor's greatest market strength has been in European markets, with the U.S.
recently catching up. Polarion has an emerging presence in the Asia/Pacific region. The
product is written in English, and is localized in Chinese, Japanese and Spanish.
Polarion's tools integrate with Eclipse, Visual Studio and a wide variety of other tools
around the life cycle, with over 200 free and paid connectors and integrations. In
addition, it has partnered with OpenMake Software and Electric Cloud to deliver DevOps
solutions.
CAUTIONS

There is no support for organizations adopting an enterprisewide agile framework, such

as SAFe.
Because of the breadth of the product and its flexibility, the initial learning curve can be
steep.
Users cite setup and maintenance documentation as an area in need of improvement.
Users note that care must be taken to properly size the product deployment to avoid
product performance and stability becoming a challenge as the number of users and
projects grows.

PTC
Consider PTC when targeting product delivery and embedded system development, due to

alignment between its PLM and ADLM tools. PTC targets its products at organizations that
build smart, connected products, which combine hardware and software and have
complex process needs. Full support is given for the key processes of requirements,
change and quality management. The vendor delivers tools that support mixed
development in agile and nonagile processes. PTC's Integrity product line supports
integration with several products, including various elements of Microsoft Office that
enable offline editing of artifacts.
STRENGTHS

There is support for compliance, distributed teams and variant complexity. PTC delivers
strong requirements and change management tools, and integration to Microsoft Office
and engineering-focused tools, such as MATLAB and Simulink.
PTC has expanded its portfolio with the recent acquisitions of Atego and Axeda, bringing
additional depth to its system engineering, process authoring/governance, and IoT
capabilities.
PTC has mature offerings for discrete manufacturers. Its quality management
capabilities include remote software monitoring, and it provides the equivalent of
DevOps for manufacturers through over the air (OTA) configuration management and
software update capabilities.
The product is delivered as a single, unified platform, but customers can purchase
functional components separately. It supports five languages (English, Japanese,
German, Chinese [Simplified] and Chinese [Traditional]).
CAUTIONS

PTC's ADLM solution does not offer support for DVCS, but provides third-party
integration.
Customers noted weakness in its SCCM capability. Recent improvements in this area
include developer productivity improvements and time-based views.
Users note that Integrity's integration with other acquired tools is an area for
improvement.
There is limited support for agile and DevOps, due to PTC's focus on support for system
engineering and regulated processes, which matches up with traditional process-driven
development.

Rally
Consider Rally if you are looking for best-of-breed agile project, program and portfolio
management. Rally is deeply involved in agile software development, and focuses on tools
and services to help companies adopt and scale agile practices. Rally was an early
supporter of SAFe, and has made substantial investments in collaboration and portfolio
management.
STRENGTHS

The vendor offers standard setting functionality for agile project, program and portfolio
management.
Rally has a strong understanding of agile, DevOps and SAFe principles.
Rally's Flowdock product offers integrated context-based collaboration.
Skilled agile development teams provide strong experience in agile transformation and
scale.
CAUTIONS

Rally has had significant management turnover in the last year.

The vendor is not focused on traditional, nonagile development.
Rally is under pressure from lower-priced competitors.
On-premises installation is only available as a VMware image.

VersionOne
Consider VersionOne if you are focused on, or migrating to, agile processes. VersionOne
has led the market with a number of innovations, and has a strong training and consulting
organization and community focus, as well as a good overall global presence. The vendor
values simplicity over complexity, and customers note ease of adoption. Like other agile
leaders, it is not well-suited to waterfall development, and does not have a full suite of
traditional requirements management, and does not manage the actual code or change
packages. These functions come through integrations with third parties.
STRENGTHS

VersionOne offers flexible licensing, and is available via SaaS or on-premises delivery
models.
The vendor provides a broad set of materials for adaptation of its tools and agile
processes, including the Agile Sherpa community portal, AgileLIVE webinars, an annual
State of Agile report and AgilePalooza events, as well as personalized coaching.
VersionOne has a broad set of prebuilt integrations.
Solid support is offered for scaling agile, including portfolio views and support for SAFe.
CAUTIONS

Currently, VersionOne only has offices in the U.S. and Europe; it relies on partners and
online interactions to support other regions.
Support for nonagile processes is limited, as is the functionality around quality
management and SCCM.
Customers have reported that administration can become cumbersome in larger
organizations. VersionOne has made several enhancements to make this process
easier.
The vendor has lower market visibility than some of its competitors.
Vendors Added and Dropped

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as
markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic
Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor's appearance in a Magic
Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market
and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.
We removed a couple of vendors that have shifted focus away from the ADLM market and,
therefore, have not been prevalent in Gartner client inquiries.

Added
No vendors were added to this Magic Quadrant.

Dropped
Serena Software: Based on information available when the inclusion decision was made
in July 2014, Gartner concluded that Serena Software did not meet the inclusion criteria
for the Magic Quadrant. After publication, Serena provided information showing that it
had been in the process of updating its ADLM strategy and offering. Although not rated
in this research, Serena may have met the minimum inclusion criteria outlined in the
Magic Quadrant at the time this document was published, and it certainly does as of
now. Gartner recommends that Serena be considered by our clients when choosing an
ADLM solution.
Telerik: While Telerik (a Progress company) still offers TeamPulse, it plays a bit more on
the project management side of the market (others include Wrike and axosoft), and also
has lost some momentum as Microsofts Agile Tools for TFS have rounded out. The
primary space for the company is application development and deployment.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To be included in this Magic Quadrant as an ADLM tool, offerings must have work item
support, as described in the Market Definition/Description section. In addition:
The vendor must have achieved a minimum of $10 million in subscription, license and/or
maintenance revenue for calendar year 2013 for the domains listed below.
The vendor must have more than two customers of at least 500 users.
Products must be generally available and actively marketed for the last four consecutive
years, without any significant company, product or service disruptions.
The vendor must provide product and support services (including training and
implementation), and will also be evaluated on its partnerships.
Average deployment times must be between two weeks and 60 days.
The vendor must be able to provide references with hundreds to thousands of users.
The vendor must have at least 600 customer installations.

Support must be provided for at least two of the following management domains:
Requirements management the ability to define requirements, manage changes and
trace dependencies
Quality management the ability to define test cases and manage defects
Project planning and management the ability to define and assign work items, and
track and report on status
Facilitation of distributed team activities
Management of change process workflows, from initial change requests or
requirements through to build and turnover for release
SCCM, including the following functionality:
Configuration identification identifying configurations, configuration items and
baselines.
Configuration control implementing a controlled change process. This is usually
achieved by setting up a change control board, the primary function of which is to
approve or reject all change requests that are sent against any baseline.
Configuration status accounting recording and reporting all the necessary
information on the status of the development process.
Configuration auditing ensuring that configurations contain all intended parts and
are sound with respect to their specifying documents (including requirements,
architectural specifications and user manuals).
Build management managing the process and tools used for builds.
Process management ensuring adherence to the organization's development
process.
Environment management managing the software and hardware that host the
system.
Teamwork facilitating team interactions related to the process.
Defect tracking making sure every defect has traceability back to the source.
Support must be provided for federated sharing across heterogeneous ADLM systems
of metadata.
Support must be provided for cross-project and portfolio dependency tracking and
reporting.
Support must be provided for custom reporting and custom integrations, beyond those
of the vendor.
The vendor must have earned a minimum of 15% of 2013 revenue from companies
headquartered on a different continent from that of the vendor's home office.

We excluded ADLM offerings that are package-focused. Specialized ADLM facilities,

emerging for major ERP environments (such as those of SAP and Oracle), need to be
considered separately. SAP clients should explore SAP ALM and offerings from
companies such as Realtech, Revelation Software Concepts and IntelliCorp, as well as the
use of SAP Solution Manager. Oracle users can explore the Oracle Change Management
Pack, as well as companies such as Dell (Quest Software), Unitask Software and Phire. No
single offering is capable of addressing ADLM needs in both custom-developed and
packaged environments at this time.
We also excluded offerings that required a significant amount of custom programming
services to complete. A number of products have some ADLM capabilities, but failed to
meet one or more of the above criteria, so we excluded them from this Magic Quadrant.
While we are seeing strong uptake of many open-source components, we have not
included open-source solutions because of the revenue requirements noted above.

Evaluation Criteria
These criteria were shifted this year to emphasize agile development and DevOps. The
results of this are most apparent in the Completeness of Vision category. As a result,
vendors without a significant agile vision and functionality appear further to the left on the
Magic Quadrant than in previous years.
Ability to Execute
Product execution is critical in this market, and Leaders are able to deliver new
functionality at a consistent pace, with consistent UIs. Because of this, we have rated the
Product/Service score for execution highly. Since most projects still use traditional
waterfall and incremental/iterative methodologies, the execution part of Product/Service
focuses on functionality that supports all methodologies. Functionality that specifically
supports agile and DevOps practices is used to generate the Completeness of Vision
score.
We have also ranked Marketing Execution as having a high impact on the ability to
execute. The primary source for this score is the number of times that other vendors in
this research mentioned the vendor as a competitor. We also factored in the amount of
client inquiry calls that discuss the vendor.
The final highly ranked criterion is Customer Experience. The most complete and bestmarketed solution is of little value unless it is well-received by the people who use it. This
score is based on usability and satisfaction stated by the reference customers used in the
creation of this research. Where there is significant feedback from client inquiries about
the usability of a product, that information is also factored into the score.
Criteria weighted at a medium level include:
Sales Execution/Pricing, including:
Geographic reach

Pricing and terms

Amount of sales
Overall Viability a standardized model is used to rank the financial viability of vendors,
including:
Financial viability of a company
Growth rate
Sustainable product investment
Important, but lower-weighted criterion included:
Market Responsiveness
Operations

Other Considerations
Many of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant face challenges in terms of their ability to
support large-scale, global enterprise use. We mainly note this with newer companies,
primarily in the agile or product delivery spaces. All the vendors included in this research
provide good support in the U.S. However, organizations that need a global-enterprisecapable vendor should focus on IBM, Microsoft, HP, Atlassian, Borland and Parasoft, with
Polarion and PTC being considered depending on market segment or specific country mix.
A key element of Ability to Execute for vendors as they mature is the ability to grow their
global businesses through partnerships, local account management and language
support.

Section 508 Compliance

Tools in the ADLM space offer mixed support for Section 508. This is especially true for
browser-based tools, which find challenges in the facilities exposed by various browsers
and rich-client browser toolkits. In addition, as tools enable visual and drag-and-droporiented facilities (such as task boards), the ability to use screen readers and provide
compelling interaction models becomes problematic. For entities that require Section 508
compliance, or that are seeking tools that support accessibility, the best support is
currently offered by Kovair, Microsoft, Parasoft and Polarion. Rocket (Aldon), Digite and
Inflectra provide partial support.
Table 1. Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria

Weighting

Product or Service

High

Overall Viability

Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing

Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record

Medium

Marketing Execution

High

Customer Experience

High

Operations

Medium

Source: Gartner (February 2015)

Completeness of Vision
The key areas of Completeness of Vision are the ability to understand the market from two
perspectives:
The rapid increase in the adoption of agile development methodologies is changing agile
ADLM from a specialty to a mainstream requirement.
The emergence of DevOps means that ADLM tools need to seamlessly plug into DevOps
tool chains.
We rated the vision of vendors by looking at how complete their offerings were for the
various use cases they participate in, as well as looking at the breadth of markets served.
Because of the strong relevance of agile, we placed the most emphasis on how vendors
are driving agile vision in the areas of collaboration, scale (both in size and roles
supported), and connection to portfolio management. We also emphasized the
connections to application release via DevOps tool chains. These elements feed the
scoring for a vendor's innovation abilities.
Vendors without strong product offerings in the emerging agile and DevOps functionality
will slowly find themselves pushed into a corner. Offering (Product) Strategy is evaluated
by looking at the current support for core agile functionality, such as support for backlogs,
scrum and kanban boards. Additionally, team collaboration functionality and the ability to
support visualization tools are judged to be important to support agile teams.
Innovation (which creates differentiation) in technology is judged based on the support for
large-scale agile frameworks, such as SAFe and DevOps practices.
Looking at the medium influences on vision (Market Understanding, Marketing Strategy,
Sales Strategy, Vertical/Industry Strategy and Business Model), we make assessments by
looking at the vendor's overall vision for the market, as well as channel strategies that
drive adoption, the ability to deliver both product and content, and/or a focus on specific
verticals (generally, this translates to the use cases supported). Note that vertical or
industry focus may be high for your organization, and it is difficult for this to be made clear
in a vendor's position. Most vendors focus on IT and customer-facing software. If your

needs are in regulated industries, embedded or system development, and/or product

delivery, we have tried to also note various abilities in our vendor descriptions in this Magic
Quadrant.
With many more vendors participating in ADLM than Gartner is mapping in a subsegment
of the market, vertical or industry strategy is less important from a Completeness of Vision
perspective. However, it will become more of a differentiating strategy for vendors that
end up servicing well-defined market segments, rather than trying to battle in the
overcrowded general market. Good examples of this are tools focused on product-centric
development teams. These teams tend to have needs for mixed project styles, as well as
variant complexity or regulatory needs that must be met.
Business model innovation is projected through the ability to utilize new models, such as
token-based and SaaS models to provide flexibility in licensing. Innovators are also looking
at ways to position their offerings as platform as a service (PaaS; see "Hype Cycle for
Platform as a Service (PaaS), 2014" ). This enables these vendors to deliver additional
value through partners, thus extending the core products. We look at the partner network
and where extensions are provided. Sales strategy is also measured by looking at
supported channels and how the vendor supports global service providers.
We weigh Geographic Strategy as low due to the vendors' ability to service customers
remotely via electronic means. We look at the number of languages supported, the points
of presence (for SaaS tools), and where partners are available for sales and support.
Table 2. Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria
Evaluation Criteria

Weighting

Market Understanding

High

Marketing Strategy

Medium

Sales Strategy

Medium

Offering (Product) Strategy

High

Business Model

Medium

Vertical/Industry Strategy

Medium

Innovation

High

Geographic Strategy

Low

Source: Gartner (February 2015)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders
Leaders have established strong market positions, as shown by breadth of adoption,
global deployments and integration of other products. They generally have breadth across
the development life cycle, and deliver market-leading functionality in one or more
functional areas. Leaders have strong capabilities in agile practices, including driving
portfolio management support and support for enterprise agile capabilities, such as SAFe
and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). This demonstrates the ability to deliver software in a
more agile fashion, as well as the provision of tools and services designed to aid agile
transformation. If vendors want to remain Leaders, then it is increasingly important for
them to support more-agile delivery schedules and diverse channels.

Challengers
Challengers have executed well in a specific use case or market, but tend to have limited
breadth or market penetration across the life cycle. These vendors tend to have wellestablished partnerships and a solid global presence. In general, Challengers may have
been innovators at one point, but are not seen as driving the application development
market. They have a strong presence in a portion of the market, but have not yet created a
strong presence in the entire market.

Visionaries
These vendors have a strong vision in a specific category that potentially disrupts the
market, but have limitations in the overall breadth of solution or geographic coverage (in
terms of language, support and partners). Because of their focus, organizations will often
find that supply chain solutions from Visionaries are easier to adopt. They may adopt
these solutions virally. Customers also may, however, swiftly replace these solutions with
the next hot product.

Niche Players
Niche Players either have a strong market niche (for example, product development) or a
significant legacy footprint. They may also provide strength in a functional area of ADLM,
but may not be as strong in other areas or may have turned their focus to adjacent areas
(such as DevOps), thus slowing product enhancements to their core product lines. In some
cases, these vendors may be more mature and able to support customers than some of
the Visionary providers.

Context
Organizations will increasingly be taking a bimodal approach to software development.
The more diverse the business and technology, the more diverse the tools an organization
will need to support delivery. Evaluations should place a high value on tool-to-tool
integration mechanisms, using XML and REST or broadly adopted proprietary
mechanisms.

Many of the providers in this Magic Quadrant provide build management and continuous
integration facilities. Some have also built or acquired support for application release
automation (ARA; see "Know the Application Release Automation Vendor Landscape to
Shortlist the Best Vendors for Your Organization" ). This will create some confusion in the
market as vendors seek to be on top of the next big buzzword. Many are already seeking
to incorporate DevOps the confluence between development, build and release and IT
operations release planning and management into the next generation of ALM.
Although the drive toward continuous integration and delivery practices will affect the
solutions in the market, organizations will need to separate the practices from specific tool
categories. When considering agile tools, they will need to evaluate the provider's agile
development and delivery, geographic distribution of teams, easy-to-use and compliant
process-centric ADLM, product delivery, and integrations.
Audit and oversight demands continue to grow in both regulated and unregulated
environments. The need for greater governance often adversely affects productivity.
Efficient coordination and automation of the delivery process require new, collaborative
approaches to the planning, measurement, execution, control and reporting of activities.
These new approaches are what differentiate ADLM tools, and what make ADLM
processes vital to leading-edge development activities.
ADLM suites have promised improved automation and integrated approaches to the
delivery of applications, but they have often fallen short of the vision. Users are seeking
ways to coordinate work and share data across phases and activities, which include
requirements definition and management, different testing activities (including test case
management), software changes, and configuration management.
However, vendors often have process enactment tools for the various major activities, and
are seeding solutions that don't require a rip-and-replace approach. They are resisting the
tendency of product suppliers to apply the ADLM term broadly to include functions
focused on project execution.
Depending on their philosophy of ADLM, vendors are taking different approaches.
However, many have shifted toward a federated repository approach. This allows specific
implementation tools (compilers, debuggers and modeling tools) to share information
about artifacts. This workflow system describes the (sometimes quite messy) sequence
of activities required to design, develop and deploy the artifact. A data warehouse enables
the capture of information about practices, so that they can be repeated. Although ADLM
includes the management of specific phases such as requirements, design and test
the extension of unified workflow and management across these phases is the key
element. The emergence of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) is enabling this
evolution through the use of XML, REST and RSS.
This Magic Quadrant represents a snapshot of the ADLM market at a particular point in
time. Gartner advises readers not to compare the placement of vendors from prior years.
The market is changing vendor acquisitions, partnerships, solution development and
alternative delivery are evidence of these changes and the criteria for selecting and

ranking vendors continue to evolve. Our assessments take into account the vendors'
current product offerings and overall strategies, as well as their future initiatives and
product road maps. We also factor in how well vendors are driving market changes or
adapting to changing market requirements.
This Magic Quadrant will help application development managers and IT leaders who are
developing their ADLM strategies to assess whether they have the right products and
enterprise platforms to support them. Gartner advises organizations against simply
selecting vendors that appear in the Leaders quadrant. All selections should be buyerspecific, and vendors from the Challengers, Niche Players and/or Visionaries quadrants
may be better matches for your business goals and solution requirements.

Market Overview
The ADLM market continues to evolve. Gartner has chosen to emphasize the agile and
DevOps portion of this market to reflect the changing practices of most of our clients. This
emphasis has moved several of the vendors that focus on traditional development, system
development or limited portions of the SDLC. The ever-changing nature of development
(including changing methods, languages, platforms and supporting tools) drives a market
that supports choices in tools and practices. Part of this will be the evolution of what
ADLM is. "ADLM" is a term focused on the SDLC, rather than the application life cycle, from
inception through retirement. In particular, the emergence of DevOps as a primary driver
will further push the connection between traditional ADLM and IT service management.
This will continue to be a driver of acquisitions in the market.
The broad range of evolving ADLM offerings and the emergence of bimodal IT leads us to
recommend a scenario-based evaluation process to narrow the list of candidates (see
"Selection Criteria for Success in Choosing ALM Products," "Toolkit: RFP for Application
Life Cycle Management and Related Tools" and "Toolkit: RFI Template for Application Life
Cycle Management and Related Tools" [Note: These documents have been archived; some
of their content may not reflect current conditions.]).
Gartner estimates that the ADLM market will continue to grow between 4% and 5%
annually through 2018. Portions of the market will remain stronger than others. Much of
the growth of the products in this Magic Quadrant is in the agile planning category. There
is also decent growth in the requirements area, particularly in definition tools, which only a
subset of the vendors in this Magic Quadrant provide.
Gartner expects that there will continue to be a variety of ADLM options. This will include
agile development teams using lighter versions of ADLM offerings; solutions integrated to
package deployments; continued growth of open-source options; and an increasing
number of cloud-delivered, ADLM PaaS solutions.
This Magic Quadrant covers only a small set of the vendors in the ADLM market. New
vendors regularly enter the market through acquisitions or by creating new point-specific
tools, as new areas or methods arise. However, there are too many discrete vendors and
few that can drive long-term direction.

This will force vendors into supporting specific market niches, such as small or midsize,
package solutions, legacy renewal, and embedded applications. We also expect that the
move toward cloud-based tools with RESTful interfaces will continue to enable and
enhance the user behavior of having tools from multiple vendors.

Evidence
To create this Magic Quadrant update, we carried out a variety of activities. A key element
was the use of online surveys of customers of the included vendors. In August 2014, we
surveyed almost 100 discrete companies in this research. In addition, we made use of
Gartner research to understand market revenue and growth. We also analyzed Gartner
client call data, and utilized information from a variety of social media sites to understand
effectiveness of execution.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market.
This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on,
whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the
market definition and detailed in the subcriteria.
Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial
health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the
individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the
product and will advance the state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.
Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the
structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation,
presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel.
Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and
achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs
evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of
responsiveness.
Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to
deliver the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and
business, increase awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with
the product/brand and organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be
driven by a combination of publicity, promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of
mouth and sales activities.
Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients
to be successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways
customers receive technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary

tools, customer support programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups,
service-level agreements and so on.
Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors
include the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs,
systems and other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and
efficiently on an ongoing basis.
Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to
translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision
listen to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with
their added vision.
Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated
throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer
programs and positioning statements.
Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of
direct and indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the
scope and depth of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the
customer base.
Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery
that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map
to current and future requirements.
Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business
proposition.
Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings
to meet the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.
Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise
or capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.
Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to
meet the specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either
directly or through partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography
and market.

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