Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a complete framework that manages a software application from its inception to its end-of-life, encompassing requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and retirement. 

 The Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) standard is the backbone of ALM integration, defining open specifications for domains such as requirements, testing, and configuration. It helps architects and tool admins improve integrations, traceability, and lifecycle governance. 

Communication is everything Imagine you’re at an international conference. Each group of participants speaks only their native language: one group in Portuguese, another in German, others in Japanese, French, and English. Everyone is passionate, but when it comes time to collaborate, conversations quickly break down. People keep repeating themselves, others try shouting louder, and some resort to scribbling pictures on napkins, creating chaos. 

Now, imagine a universal translator device arrives, and everyone agrees to use it. Suddenly, no matter what language you speak, you can express your idea once, and it will be consistently understood across the whole conference. There’s no need to change how you speak at home; you will always be on common ground. 

An engineering team is working on a critical project. Their tools are scattered across the lifecycle: 
• IBM DOORS Next (DNG): managing requirements. 
• Jira: handling change requests and development tasks.
• TestRail: covering test cases and execution results.

Next week, an external audit is scheduled. The auditors will ask tough questions:
• Can you prove that each requirement has a related change request?
• Can you demonstrate that every change was tested?
• Can you show test evidence (results, attachments, and responsible owners)? 

Manual detective work:
• The team exports requirements from DNG into spreadsheets.
• Jira issues are pulled separately into another report.
• TestRail results are exported into PDFs or CSVs.

Broken links & mismatches:
• A requirement in DNG may reference a Jira issue ID, but there’s no guarantee the ID is still valid or even matches.
• Tests in TestRail are linked only via naming conventions (REQ-123), which are error-prone.

Audit preparation becomes firefighting:
• Analysts spend days manually merging spreadsheets to map requirements → changes → tests.
• Every inconsistency has to be explained (“this test case was renamed,” “that issue was closed but not updated in the spreadsheet”).
• Instead of focusing on quality, the team wastes time reconciling data.

Compliance risk:
• If an auditor challenges a link, the proof is shaky at best.
• Traceability is fragmented and lacks a trusted single source of truth.

Result: Stress, late nights, inconsistent reports, and a real risk of audit findings. 

Live, linked data across tools:
• Each requirement in DNG can be directly linked to its implementing change request in Jira.
• That same change request is linked to verification tests in TestRail.
• The links are referenced, not copied; each tool keeps its data, but the relationships are visible everywhere.

Traceability out-of-the-box:
• In DNG, the auditor can click a requirement and instantly see the related Jira change and its status.
• From Jira, they can navigate to TestRail results without leaving the context.
• Reports can be generated directly from linked data, eliminating the need for manual merges.

Confidence in the audit:
• The team can demonstrate end-to-end traceability: Requirement → Change → Test → Result.
• Every link is current because it’s retrieved from the live systems, not a stale export.
• Compliance questions are answered with evidence in seconds, not hours.

Shift in focus:
• Instead of firefighting data consolidation, the team focuses on improving coverage and fixing real gaps.
• The audit shifts from a stressful event to an opportunity to showcase maturity.

Result: Seamless reporting, stress-free audit readiness, and greater trust in the engineering process. 

OSLC is an open initiative, governed by OASIS, that creates specifications for integrating tools across software and product development lifecycles, such as Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM). By defining common resource models and linking patterns, OSLC enables tools to share information seamlessly, allowing for better collaboration and smart integrations. 

• OSLC leverages existing web standards like RESTful APIs and Linked Data principles to enable interoperability between ALM tools over the web.
• OSLC specifies that the resources must be represented using RDF, allowing the data to be represented semantically and enabling links with defined semantics (typed relationships), instead of only plain hyperlinks.
• OSLC resources might belong to specific disciplines, e.g., requirements to Requirement Management, and test cases to Quality Management.
• The OSLC Specifications define shapes and vocabularies to model your resources. OSLC also defines standards for Discovery, Query, Configuration Management, Delegated Dialogs, and many other essential features for seamless integration and improved traceability.

For an application to comply with OSLC, it needs to tick the following boxes at a minimum. 

Implements OSLC Core specifications (Discovery, RDF, REST, and JSON/XML representations). 
Provides correct use of Resource
Shapes to define resource properties. Supports standard HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) consistently.

Exposes a Service Provider Catalog endpoint.
Includes clear descriptions of domains and services offered (Requirements, Change Management, Test Management, etc.).
Allows clients to discover resources dynamically (no hardcoding of URLs). 

Uses OSLC-defined link types (e.g., oslc_rm:implementedBy, oslc_cm:affectsTestResult).
Supports bidirectional navigation (users can follow links across tools).
Maintains persistent, stable URIs for resources. 

Supports standard OSLC security models (OAuth 1.0a/2.0 (depending on product) or enterprise SSO/OIDC bridging, as applicable).
Ensures secure access while still enabling delegated UIs and linked data. 

In practice, OSLC integration follows a simple consumer–provider model. A tool acting as the consumer (for example, Jira wanting to link to a requirement) first establishes friendship (a trust relationship) with the provider (IBM DNG, which exposes requirements). This “friending” step obtains the provider’s Service Provider Catalog and trust details so the consumer knows what domains and services the provider offers. 

Once trust is established, the consumer can use OSLC delegated UIs to let users search or create resources directly in the provider system, while maintaining live links. The result is a seamless workflow: tools remain independent, but OSLC ensures they can securely discover, link, and navigate each other’s data in real time. 

In a world where engineering teams juggle requirements, changes, and tests across different tools, OSLC stands out as the universal translator, turning confusion into clarity and silos into seamless collaboration. By adopting OSLC, organizations gain live traceability, simplified audits, and the confidence that every tool is speaking the same language.

Right now, your tools are probably speaking different languages. OSLC is the common tongue that makes collaboration natural and effortless. Want your applications to speak the same language? Reach out! We’ll help you get there.