Application Lifecycle Management

Application lifecycle management is the lifecycle management of applications and includes governance, development and maintenance. For everyone working with Power Platform ALM includes setting up environment strategies, managing Solutions, automating deployment e.g. with pipelines in DevOps etc. Related to this is the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit which is a set of templates provided by Microsoft which you can use in order to set up your own Center of Excellence.

Basic Process

A basic ALM process could contain the following 3 pipelines, for more information, also see the page Pipelines.

Create Export from DEV

This build pipeline would:

• Export the solution from DEV
• Do some Quality Gates (for example run solution Checker)
• Unpack the solution
• Check it into source control

It could also handle stuff like:

• Set correct version
• Deploy code components (JS, Plugins, PCFs, ...) before exporting
• ...

Build Managed Solution

The second build pipeline would create a managed solution from the repository and publish it as an artefact.

Run in one

The first two pipelines could also be run in one.

JIT-Build Environment

There might be problems with creating a JIT-Build Environment on the fly. See the post in Community Resources which contains more information on that.

Deploy to Downstream environments

The last part of a basic process would be a Release Pipeline to deploy the created artefact to the downstream environments.

Also see

• How to set Environment Variables value
• Environment Variables

Microsoft Resources

• Application lifecycle management (ALM) with Microsoft Power Platform
• ALM Key Updates - March 2021

Community Resources

• PowerPlatform-ALM-Learning-Resources GitHub repository gathering ALM resources
• Power Platform ALM Starter Kit
• CDS - Basic ALM Process by Benedikt Bergmann
• Quality Gate for check-ins by Benedikt Bergmann

External Resources

• ALM on Wikipedia