Polarion Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

Connect teams and projects, and improve application development processes with a single, unified solution for requirements, coding, testing and release.

Two workers having a meeting at a desk.

Accelerate innovation with Polarion ALM

Release faster and more frequently while maintaining end-to-end traceability and visibility into your application lifecycle.

Define, build, test and manage complex software systems in a unified 100 percent browser-based solution that serves small teams or thousands of users.

Polarion was fundamental to our success thanks to the real-time access to centralized information at the right level for each collaborator.
Stephanie Schwendinger, System Development, Zumtobel Group

Discover the benefits of Polarion ALM

Enhance collaboration

Enable teams collaborate on shared assets easily and securely. Control who can see what, who can change what and when via granular permission controls and robust configurable workflow automation.

Increase traceability

Access complete information about every step in a development process. Every step is just a click away—starting with modified lines of code up to high-level change requests.

Effectively reuse data

Reuse or branch your data for effective sequential or parallel project and product line development, allowing you to share requirements, code and tests between projects.

Explore Polarion ALM features

Experience one unified solution that delivers project transparency through real-time aggregated management information. Polarion ALM includes the following features to help teams respond faster and with better quality to new business opportunities and customer demands.

Core functionality

Collaboration, traceability and workflow are the three core principles built into our DNA. With Polarion ALM you'll be able to:

  • Facilitate synchronicity and get 100 percent browser-based access to all Polarion data
  • Enable real-time communication between analysts, engineers, QA members and DevOps teams via threaded discussions, wikis, notifications, alerts and more
  • Pass any audit, compliance or regulatory inspection with traceability that is easily implemented and guaranteed via automatic change control of every requirement
  • Manage work items and documents via workflows that enforce how and when they move from state to state based on definable rules, with full audit trails, electronic signature and security
  • Access our time machine to browse, search and report any historical state of your project just like you do the current state
  • Use native clustering for load balancing and failover strategies
  • Leverage out-of-the-box integrations and Open APIs to extend functionality
Screenshot of Polarion software.

Change and configuration management

Screenshot of Polarion software.

Understand the who, what, when and why of any changes. Get the following change and configuration management with Polarion ALM.

  • View every artifact: system requirements specifications, verification procedures, project plans and tasks—everything is simply stored in version control repositories, so every modification produces a version history record
  • Access versioning for the project and global configuration, giving you full auditability and visibility of your process configuration and improvements
  • Bring organization and accountability to the process of gathering, vetting and implementing the inevitable change requests that happen during every project
  • Verify that the final delivered software has all of the planned enhancements that are supposed to be included in the release by full traceability of every source code modification up to the change request
  • Support SVN and GIT out of the box, and other software (for example: Perforce; Plastic SCM) via add-ons

Test and quality management

Manage all testing activities from a central platform. Polarion ALM allows you to:

  • Create test cases and easily link them to their corresponding work items such as requirements, change requests, other test cases and more
  • Parameterize your test steps to separate a test specification and test items configuration so you can execute the same procedure several times to fully cover your complex test conditions
  • Automatically create bug reports and tasks for developers based on test failures to shorten the fix time
  • Leverage automated test cases as a "first-class citizen." Integrate with third-party test automation tools via Open API, create auto-run via builds and be import-ready for any test results in xUnit file format
  • Execute test cases with online test execution panel or offline by exporting to MS Excel and importing test results back
  • Build traceability from requirements, not just to test cases but individual test records
  • Accurately and consistently automate verification and verification tasks with electronic signatures
  • Access our HP QC Connector and get seamless integration with the HP Quality Center for test management
Screenshot of Polarion software.

Reuse and branch management

Screenshot of Polarion software.

Reuse or branch your data for effective sequential, parallel project or product line development. Polarion ALM allows you to:

  • Save time on managing isolated copies of your documents. No need to copy/paste on every change of your common specification
  • Share regulatory requirements across your projects as Polarion Derived Documents so you can distribute their updates on-demand easily
  • Branch specification documents to effectively manage commonalities between your products, and still be able to track the product specific requirements
  • Distribute changes from master specifications to branched document without copy/paste instantly or on demand for more granular and manual change request distribution

Agile/Hybrid project management

Adopt modern agile techniques at once—or incrementally—with out of the box project templates that can be adjusted to your needs. You'll get the following agile features:

  • Iterative planning with team velocity management to set predictions on empirical data
  • Support for your preferred estimation methodology: time, story points, money and the ability to predict the project completion based on calculated velocity
  • Define done workflow conditions, for example, mark a story as done only if documentation task is performed, performance test assessment is attached, etc.
  • Link agile user stories with supportive documentation such as component and design requirement specifications to ensure functional and quality consistency
  • Electronically sign the use stories as approved by quality control engineers or product owners
  • Setup a continuous integration and verification process with automated traceability from reported issues to user stories
  • Enable baselining and versioning. Agile means change, and by using Polarion, you can quickly see who changed what, when and why!
  • Achieve both speed and compliance. Polarion has been proven to be the ideal enterprise agile solution
Screenshot of Polarion software.

Connectors and extensibility

Screenshot of Polarion software.

Out of the box integrations with popular tools. Free, open APIs let you build your own apps and extensions, including:

  • Polarion Connector for Matlab Simulink: Link Simulink models and Stateflow charts with Polarion Work Items
  • Polarion Connector for Azure DevOps: Bring Product and Project Management teams in the loop with their Development Counterparts that use Azure DevOps
  • Polarion Connector for HP QC: Seamless integration with HP Quality Center used for test management
  • Polarion Connector for Jira: Seamless integration with Atlassian JIRA used for issue tracking
  • Custom connectors: Built on open standards, our professional services or your team can build you custom integrations with other complementary third-party solutions
  • Java Open API and Web Services API: Leverage the Polarion API and build your own extension/integration
  • Extensions Platform: Leverage the skills of the entire community of 10,000 members, 150 extensions

Audits, metrics and reports

Improve decision-making and project execution with detailed analytics and real-time status reports. Polarion ALM lets you:

  • View any report online in real-time, including on mobile devices—or export to pdf for offline access
  • Easily create your own reports with our online WYSIWYG report designer
  • Open any report from any historical moment with our exclusive time machine functionality
  • Run reports across multiple projects to help coordinate activities across disparate teams, and use BIRT for reporting across multiple data sources
  • Automate event monitoring and change notifications plus push important information to collaborators via My Polarion dashboards
  • Assess the performance of your project in real-time—live, always up-to-date and fully configurable to your needs
  • Ensure your code meets metrics for security, reliability and maintainability with status source code analysis
  • Extend the reporting capabilities by in-place scripting with full access to Open API or deploy your own custom widgets
Screenshot of Polarion software.

Requirements management

Screenshot of Polarion software.

Effectively gather, author, approve and manage requirements across the full project lifecycles.

  • An exclusive innovation, Polarion LiveDocs, enables you to collaborate concurrently and securely on specification documents while having every single paragraph uniquely identifiable and traceable
  • All the requirement specification documents are instantly exposed to all other ALM stakeholders for review, approval or development
  • Easily import existing assets using the rule-based Import Wizard. It recognizes artifacts like requirements, test cases, etc. contained in Microsoft Word or Excel and quickly imports them to our modern, browser-based platform
  • Export for offline collaboration so changes made outside of Polarion can be imported back seamlessly
  • Built-in ReqIF enables lossless requirements and test case specifications exchange with customers and suppliers
  • Invite and require stakeholders to electronically sign the specification documents as reviewed or approved before they can be released to production
  • Build test cases in parallel with requirements in our unified solution for test and requirements

Issue and risk management

Track all possible and reported failures. Plan and assign tasks to mitigate them. Get the ability to:

  • Track issues automatically on any test failure, no matter if test is manual or automated, performed in Polarion or in a third-party tool, you can ensure the issue is tracked immediately for all activities
  • Assign issues automatically based on issue classification (category, severity, component, etc.)
  • Analyze the quality of the requirements by measuring the number of issues and change requests linked to requirements (imported or tracked manually in Polarion)
  • Identify all possible failures, risks, harms and hazards, and plan and assign tasks to mitigate the potential risk
  • Access built-in project templates (fully customizable), allowing you to manage potential risks, follow the standard Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) approach and save time when creating risk assessment for new projects
  • Reduce the risk of critical bugs going untested before being released into the field
Screenshot of Polarion software.

Planning and resource management

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Improve utilization and release predictability using live planning and granular time tracking.

  • Follow any methodology (Waterfall, Agile, Hybrid) to plan your releases, milestones and iterations, and make your plan transparent and always up-to-date to the entire organization
  • Determine the potential change request impacts on release timelines and resource allocations by reviewing an actual impact analysis tree view of changed requirements and test specifications
  • Spot potential bottlenecks before they occur through live, real-time reports, delays and workloads
  • Drag-and-drop to set priority, or use multilevel prioritization with auto calculation from sub-levels using change hooks
  • Live dashboards and a "LivePlan" enable you to quickly get a handle on project status and progress, reveal dependencies and over- or under-utilized resources in real-time as team members complete assigned tasks
  • Simple, straightforward time tracking; people log actual time spent on tasks as they close them
  • Work on multiple projects and inspect and review your organization-wide, cross-project plans

Build and release management

Setup the continuous delivery and iterative development to release frequently without compromising the consistency, integrity and regulatory compliance.

  • Ensure that what gets built is what was planned by detailed Product Release to Line of Code traceability
  • Improve overall collaboration and process automation between Development and Operations (DevOps)
  • Leverage our integrations with leading tools such as Hudson, Ant and Maven, and ElectricCloud
  • Quickly track down issues with complete audit trails of builds and releases
  • Speed up compile and error recovery processes with mail notifications on build or test failures
Screenshot of Polarion software.
Case Study

Vaillant Group

Creating a central collaboration platform
Case Study

Creating a central collaboration platform

Company:Vaillant Group

Industry:Energy & utilities

Location:Remscheid, Germany

Siemens Software:Polarion

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