Software
development life cycle (SDLC) or application development
lifecycle involves different stages and phases such as initiation,
system concept development, planning, requirements analysis, design,
development, integration, testing, implementation, maintenance and
disposition. For managing and supporting these phases, companies and
organizations use variety of tools (that can be open source,
purchased or proprietary) from multiple vendors and open source
providers. The tools that include IBM RequisitePro, ClearQuest,
ClearCase, Enterprise Architect, HP Quality Center, Microsoft TFS,
SharePoint, Visual Studio, Eclipse IDE, Atlassian Jira, Perforce, CA
Clarity, Subversion and Hudson are the best of breed tools. However,
these tools are siloed point function tools, which leave the
different stakeholders such as business analysts, architects,
developers, testers and managers with no idea regarding the overall
application development activities and status.
Almost
all companies and organizations have an application development
environment that is fragile and this is because of the lack of
effective collaboration and synchronization between the different
practitioner tools. And the result of such a fragile environment is
limited traceability, wasted effort and time, unstable integrations,
lower productivity, poor quality and unsatisfactory software
delivery. This led to the development of Open Service for Lifecycle
Collaboration (OSLC) initiative to facilitate effortless integration
between disparate tools. OSLC is divided into different workgroups
namely Quality Management, Requirements Management, Software
Configuration management, Change Management, Build Automation and so
on.
OSLC
was formalized in 2009 and the first workgroup to be formed was
the Change
management work group. It involved individuals from IBM,
Accenture, Eclipse Mylyn/Tasktop and so on. Today there are many such
workgroups formed around other lifecycle stages and includes
individuals from more than 30 different organizations including
Siemens, Tieto, Oracle, General Motors, and Northrop Grumman.
Thanks
to OSLC integration, life has become easier for software and product
developers and tool vendors as Application
Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Product Lifecycle Management
(PLM) has become less daunting and complex. By standardizing the way
in which the lifecycle tools can share data, OSLC integration has
made it possible for the various high breed disparate software
lifecycle tools to collaborate easily.
The
following are some of the benefits of OSLC
integration.
*
Implement leaner and more agile processes
*
Reduce costs
*
Companies can increase the value they produce
*
Improve business results
*
Facilitate enhanced traceability across artifacts and every step in a
process chain
*
Save considerable time and effort
*
Facilitate easy and effortless integration
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