Dr. Dobb's Journal is the essential multi-language/multi-platform resource for professional programmers and software developers. You'll read about algorithms, coding tips, working code, discussions of fundamental design issues and actual program listings guaranteed to make you a better programmer.

IT organizations spend billions of dollars a year on development life-cycle tools that don't play well together. The result? For most shops, application life-cycle management (ALM)—the coordination of development life-cycle activities—is still largely a manual process. Today's ALM suites don't offer much support for ALM beyond what can be accomplished through brittle tool-to-tool integrations. But tomorrow's ALM platforms will do much better by providing common services to practitioner tools. These solutions will be easier to implement, maintain, and employ. And at the end of the day, they'll enable development organizations to build better software.

Requirements management is an often underutilized discipline in software development. Yet the economic benefits—lowered development costs, faster development and better products that delight customers—have been demonstrated in study after study. In this paper, renowned engineering process expert Karl Wiegers makes the case for requirements management as an integral part of any product lifecycle. Metrics are provided to show the positive effect of requirements management, from individual developers to the business to the customer.