A shift left strategy is already at play with vendors offering the means to better coordinate multiple teams, release cycles, customizable workflows, and integrated business decision making unique to their organizations.How did we get here?Different teams tend to use different processes to manage development activities. The need to abstract the processes and aggregate performance data is essential.Shorter development lifecycles have been putting pressure to ensure communication between team members remains strong.The need to track multiple release schedules and operational changes concurrently required strong pipeline management.Understand where we are now:Release management supports concurrent short lifecycles:Release management continues to strengthen with ability to conduct concurrent releases all traced within the pipeline back to requirements.Virtual test lab management aims at both convenience and test lifecycle reduction:The ability to more closely approximate production environments removes some guesswork in performance gaps. Provisioning separate labs using virtualization and automation speeds up concurrent functional testing.Emphasis on policy and compliance:Business stakeholders have the ability to assess launch risk based on policy and measured aggregated metrics from all domains within the SDLC. With full stack solutions offering integration with multiple competing solutions, aggregate data points are available to decision makers.with multiple competing solutions, aggregate data points are available to decision makers.Know where we are going:With shorter development lifecycles, the ability to automate parts of the SDLC are critical in supporting quality and consistency.With many popular open source tools being used as point solutions within the SDLC, we expect to see continued integration between ALM tools and popular open source tools.Deployment options to cloud will continue to increase.Incremental cluster releases for better workload management.