Generally whenever different tools are utilized by different groups they tend to become silos of information and often end up giving some problems that include:
● Redundant and often conflicting information in multiple tools
Manually consolidating different change requests in different tools can be quite a tedious process and can also be prone to severe errors therefore it lacks any consistency.
● Zero process across the tools
Any enterprise even with its developed mature and automated support process including defect tracking and requirements management faces integration and synchronization problems.
● Zero traceability and other relations between information locked in individual tools
In a development enterprise traceability may not be the sole important relation, other relationships are equally important which includes, Successor/ Predecessor, Contains/ Belongs to, Parent/ Child across different tools. And such information could be missing.
● Manual consolidated reporting
It is typically quite a task to create a document like Release Note especially when it includes information from different tools such as new enhancements from the Requirements Tool, bug fixes from the Defect Tracking Tool and Changes from the Helpdesk?
● Zero visibility
With all information being locked in an individual tool that can be specifically used by one particular group what generally transpires is that it tends to remain invisible to the rest of the enterprise.
This is where integration tools such as integration bus can be of assistance. Integration Bus allows for a two way total synchronization between two tools for a particular Entity and helps keep all the information current in both tools. It also enables integration between multiple tools managing the same type of items. For instance a transparent synchronization among multiple Requirements Management tools can keep the particular users of each tool aware of what is happening in the other tools. Additionally, Integration Bus synchronizes not just the data but also relations between items. This means that synchronization of data is just the starting point of any meaningful integration, with integration bus; a bigger value can be gained by synchronization of the relations among these data.
The bus also allows 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 only the approved ones need to be replicated. Furthermore it also enables federation of data in terms of getting the data from other repositories on-demand. It is not necessary or even desirable to have all data from all tools to be replicated in the other tools. With the integration bus, an on-demand access of data ensures that there is minimization of the data replication and network traffic.
No comments:
Post a Comment