As the world market for products with embedded software expands, a persistent gap between software development and other systems engineering disciplines is leading to myriad quality problems, costs, and recalls. Increasingly, application development professionals are recognizing that making just a few key process innovations — and associated linkages between application life-cycle management (ALM) and product life-cycle management (PLM) applications — can help better connect their software to the physical systems engineering domain and help close this quality gap.