My company is evaluating adopting off-the-shelf ALM products to aid in our development lifecycle; we currently use our own homegrown solutions to manage requirements gathering, specification documentation, testing, etc. One of the issues I am having is that we have what we call a pipeline, which consists of particular stops:

[Source] -> [QC] -> [Production]

At the first stop, the developer works out a solution to some requested change and performs individual testing. When that process is complete (and peer review has been performed), our ALM system physically moves the affected programs from the [Source] runtime environment to the [QC] runtime environment. You can think of this as analogous to moving some web pages from the 'test' server to the 'live' server, where QC personnel can bang on the system and complain that the developer has it all wrong ;-) Once QC signs off that the changes are working, the system again moves the code along to the next stage, where additional testing is performed, etc.

I have been searching the internet for a few days trying to find how the process is accomplished anywhere else -- I have read a bit about builds, automated testing, various ALM products, etc. but nowhere does any of this state how builds interact with initial change requests, what the triggers are, how dependencies are managed, how the various forms of testing are accommodated (e.g. unit testing, integration testing, regression testing), etc.

Can anyone point me to any resources or attempt to explain (generically) how a change could/should be tracked and moved though the development lifecycle? I'd be very appreciative.

To keep things consistent, let's say that we have a project called Calculator, which we want to add support for the basic trigonometric functions: sine, cosine and tangent. I'm open to reorganizing the company however we need to in order to accomplish due diligence testing and we can suppose that any tools are available for use (if that helps to illustrate the process).

To start things off, I think I understand this much:

• we document the requirements, e.g.: support sine, cosine and tangent functions
• we create some type of change request/work order to assign to programming
• coding takes place, commits are made to version control
• peer review commences
• programmer marks the work order as completed? ...

now what? How does QC do their thing? Would they perform testing before closing the 'work order'?