Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the product lifecycle management (governance, development, and maintenance) of computer programs. It encompasses requirements management, software architecture, computer programming, software testing, software maintenance, change management, continuous integration, project management, and release management.

ALM is a broader perspective than the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), which is limited to the phases of software development such as requirements, design, coding, testing, configuration, project management, and change management. ALM continues after development until the application is no longer used, and may span many SDLCs.

A research director with research firm Gartner proposed changing the term ALM to ADLM (Application Development Life-cycle Management) to include DevOps, the software engineering culture and practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops).

Some specialized software suites for ALM are: