Integrating Tools for an Efficient Software Development Life Cycle

Organizations in their attempt towards meeting the challenges of the competitive business environment look towards technology and its advances to be benefitted by it. Technological innovations help the globally bound business organizations to be networked and be communicative in all respects, be update with software applications for faster and better business transactions.

However, the software development aspects are taken care of by the experts in the IT industry. Technically, software development is a complex process and goes through various stages of development procedure which is termed as software development lifecycle (SDLC). The basic stages of software development can be detailed as understanding the requirements which includes need for software, client expectations and technical feasibility. After analyzing the requirements and technical feasibility, comes the initiation which starts with the design phase, made up of system design and component design. While the system design caters to the design of the software as a whole, the component design plans for the individual components. This is followed by the implementation, testing, documentation, project deployment and maintenance phases.

However, today with technological innovations gaining a center stage, a number of enterprises from the IT sector have forayed into the business of providing SDLC solutions. These solutions helps organizations to ease out the complexities of business and IT and also help in achieving the organizational goals and objectives. The stages of the software development cycle follow a definite development methodology as per the organizational requirements or the requirements of the project. Customization of the software development lifecycle requires the service providers to evaluate each requirement before formulating the development strategy. SDLC follows either the traditional waterfall development methodology or the iterative one or an agile methodology. The software development lifecycle facilitates improving the requirements management for software development, and the quality and efficiency of the products delivered.

With the primary objective to enhance the quality and efficiency of the software delivered, SDLC solutions provides adequate control and reporting formats. The software development lifecycle solutions offered by the leaders in the industry include a number of tools which need to be integrated. The first one being the requirements management software tools, followed by test management, issue management, risk management, release management and IT project management. Other functions such as configuration management can be achieved through integration of third party tools with the help of the integration bus adapters.

Though there are in-built tools that facilitate integration from external locations, the ecosystem requires point-to-point integrated multi-vendor tools. The word-class multivendor tools include eclipse integration, subversion integration, quality center integration and TFS integration tools. Software development life cycle thus gains it strength from uniformity in design, methods and operations.

Other Links

Perforce Integration

Sharepoint integration

Importance of OSLC Tools Integration

Software development process or software development lifecycle (SDLC) is a comprehensive framework that describes the various phases and the various activities that need to be performed at each phase of software development. It is a complicated process where the software development team has to go through various stages namely

* Initiation

* System Concept Development and Planning

* Requirements analysis

* Design

* Development

* Testing

* Implementation

* Maintenance

* Disposition

However, blind adherence to the various development stages will not guarantee success. The software development process must involve careful planning, meticulous execution, good communication and prompt reaction. Only then, the software development team can develop software that conforms to customer requirements.

The different stakeholders in the software development process namely requirements analysts, architects, developers, coders, testers, managers and operations personnel require various tools to manage and support the different phases of the software development process. The different tools required by the software development team include requirements management tools, test management tools, issues management tools, risk management tools, release management tools, and project management tools. Let us look at the role of some of these tools in software development process.

Team Foundation Server (TFS)

TFS is a tool that helps the development team in source control, data collection, reporting and project tracking. TFS integration platform facilitates integration between TFS and external systems like bug-tracking systems. This platform helps build tools that move data unidirectionally into TFS, and tools that manage data bidirectionally.

Visual Studio

An integrated development environment, Visual Studio includes a code editor, debugger, forms designer, web designer, class designer, data designer, and mapping designer. Since it allows plug-ins, compilers, editors and debuggers can enhance its functionalities at almost every level.

JIRA

JIRA is an issue-tracking tool that helps in issue tracking, bug tracking and project management.

Eclipse

An integrated development environment, Eclipse helps in developing applications in Java and with the help of various plug-ins, other programming languages such as C, C++, COBOL, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Groovy, Scheme and so on.

SharePoint

A web application platform, it helps companies and organizations in managing their web requirements. As it is heavily integrated with the Office suite of tools, even non-experts can use this multipurpose web tool and its functions.

These are best of breed tools but these are siloed point function tools as well. Hence, though these tools provide great assistance to the various stakeholders, the lack of effective collaboration and synchronization between these tools affects team collaboration and communication very badly. Until recently, almost all companies faced such a problem but the development of Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative has succeeded in putting an end to this situation through effortless integration. Thanks to OSLC integration, the various stakeholders now have a clear picture regarding the overall application development activities and status.

Other Links

 Requirements traceability matrix

Eclipse integration

Fulfilling Results with the Integrated ALM Tools

The globalized business environment is the result of technological innovations which have arisen from factors such as customer demands and scientific inventions. However to meet the aggressive competitiveness prevalent in such an environment, organizations still struggle to develop new products, services and applications that adhere to IT governance and compliance practices. Irrespective of the type product or application, these are further bound by its respective lifecycle period.
Application Lifecycle management or ALM is a continuous process which involves managing the lifecycle of an application through its development, maintenance, governance and compatibility stages. These three, governance, development and operation are the distinct aspects of ALM. Governance extends over the entire application lifecycle and includes all of the decision-making and project management aspects.  Development, which spans through an application’s lifecycle, includes the process of creating an application and its multiple upgrades and newer versions. Operation refers to the work required to run an application. The business value of the software or application is thus dependent on all these aspects.

Further, the successful implementation of IT governance and compliance practices paves for an increased productivity levels in the organization.

Technological innovations have paved way for the development of a number of ALM tools However, the diversity of these tools makes application lifecycle management a complicated process. Since ALM refers to the management of all phases of an applications lifecycle, through one tool, integrating the various tools will not only simplify the diversity and will also make ALM implementation a much easier process.

In an environment where most of the projects are handled by teams which are distantly located, ALM tools thus developed must be one that would cover aspects like requirement management, test management, issue management, change management, release management,  collaboration management etc . An integrated tool will help project managers gain better control over their projects, provide better collaborations between the distantly located team members and facilitate traceability between project artifacts while eliminating unnecessary documentation. Ideally integration should be both horizontally and vertically.

Leading service providers however offer client organization with software development life cycle tool integration process with three alternative approaches; a point-to-point integrated multi vendor tools, single vendor integrated ALM tools and a multi-vendor best of breed Integrated ALM Tools. The point-to-point integration though simple has complications when implementing changes. The Single vendor tools integration also has limitations, whereas the multi-vendor tools integration process is free from any limitations.

The  integration approach based on  ALM platform technology makes application development significantly simpler, protects investments, allows organizations to use best of the breed tools by integration multiple third party ALM tools such as eclipse integration, TFS integration etc from various vendors in a single ecosystem. Further, without any hard-coded integration business rules, these are configurable at the mouse controls and has a multi-tool proactive change analysis with a flexible traceability matrix between various artifacts.

Other Links

Enterprise service bus

SDLC