How to integrate and Process enable your ecosystem?

Managing a software development project across a number of functionally, geographically and technologically distributed groups can be done only with proper integration. Lack of integration can cause several problems in the various development tools in a development shop. Adopting an integrated technology and an effective ecosystem is the best way to implement and automate processes across several unconnected tools.

Consequences of unconnected tools:

• Redundant and conflicting information in multiple tools.
• Lack of process across the tools.
• No Traceability and other relations between information locked in individual tools.
• Manual consolidated reporting.
• Lack of visibility.

An Integration bus technology not only allows a multi-tool integration in enterprise service bus architecture, but also offers a significant savings in integration effort and cost over ad-hoc point –to-point integrations.

• Permits total synchronization between two tools for an entity- An Integration Bus allows for a two way total synchronization between two tools for a particular entity to keep all the information current in both tools. This is why dual way synchronization is necessary.

• Enables integration between multiple tools- An integration bus technology facilitates integration between multiple tools managing the same type of items. To elucidate, a transparent synchronization among multiple Requirements Management tools will keep the other users of each tool aware of what is happening in other tools.

• Coordinates relations between items - Integration Bus synchronizes not just the data but also relations between items. The starting point of any meaningful integration is the synchronization of data. There is a larger value gained by the relations among this data.

• Helps decide what needs to be replicated – An Integration Bus allows the business rule to decide when and what to replicate across different tools. For example not all Requirements need to be replicated from the Requirements management tool to the test management tool but only those which are approved.

• Enables federation of data from other repositories- An Integration Bus allows confederacy of data from other repositories on-demand. An on-demand access of data allows minimization of the data replication and network traffic.

Integration and automation is absolutely vital for any process. Multiple groups at different locations, using different tools, without a process will lead to difficulty in controlling and managing information creation and flow. The best solution is to define, implement, automate and enforce processes using the best available process automation tools. Having process capability across integrated tools is a requirement very few development tool vendors addresses even across their own tools sets. But today, an service integration bus technology with built-in task based process engines can help to not only  to process-enable myriads of tools that do not have any built-in process engine, but also makes  them participate in a larger macro process tools.

Learn more about: application lifecycle management here.