What is the difference between application lifecycle management and DevOps, and why does the distinction matter?

Application lifecycle management is the full span of a change: how it is proposed, prioritised, designed, built, tested, released, operated and eventually retired. DevOps is a narrower set of practices and cultural expectations concerned with shortening the loop between building and running — automation, source control, continuous integration and delivery, shared ownership of production.

The distinction matters because clients ask for DevOps and mean ALM. They have a delivery problem — unclear priorities, no environment strategy, no test discipline — and they have been told the answer is a pipeline. If I install a pipeline over that, I automate an ungoverned process and make the failures faster.

So my first move on a DevOps engagement is usually an ALM maturity assessment across people, process and technology, and my recommendation is sequenced by the weakest of the three rather than by what the tool vendor's demo showed.