State-of-the-art application lifecycle management (ALM) platforms offer many benefits that enable the software development team to smoothly plan, execute and monitor its development activities. However, to first-time adopters of ALM platforms, the initial adoption presents three challenges that often prevent a successful adoption: to correctly define the team’s current software development activities, to correctly configure the ALM platform accordingly to support these activities, and to ensure that the team follows the decreed discipline throughout the lifecycle. To take on the three challenges effectively and efficiently, we propose a new approach called Rapid Application Lifecycle Management (RALM). RALM features a reference model that is described by a number of activity templates, which allows the adopter to customize, review, discuss, and revise ALM activities in rapid cycles. All customized activity templates are machine- translated to the target ALM platform: activity definitions are translated into process templates and configuration guide and the decreed discipline into engineering practice guidance for the team. An experiment to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of RALM is presented.