Ensuring A Collaborative Development Environment With Eclipse Plug-in

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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In almost all the phases of the software development cycle have a significant involvement of numerous stakeholders. Due to their geographic locations and roles it has become a challenge to ensure – collaborative development environment for the stakeholders. With Eclipse IDE developers can work together with other stakeholders like Business Analysts, Architects, Project Managers and share information. Using a plug-in for Eclipse ensures collaboration among the stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle, and synchronization among different ALM tools. Established processes, tools and practices can be seamlessly integrated in an organization, with a plug-in to provide an improved platform for developers.

Understanding how a plug-in works

For any organization to develop its own plug-ins for their home-grown tools using the same open service API, it is essential for the Plug-in to be SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) based. By the means of reliable user credentials, eclipse users like the developers can hook up to TIDE or Tools Integrated Development Environment. The developers can then work on them ...
... as per given privileges as the data gets collected from integrated Application Lifecycle Management tools, by means of these open APIs. The access of Eclipse developers can usually be extended to other artifacts like – Requirements, Design Artifacts, Test Cases, Tasks and Defects stemming from varied ALM tools with a plug- in.

A Quick Glance at the benefits

An organization can benefit from its integration of processes, tools and practices using plug-in for Eclipse in the numerous ways. With an eclipse plug-in there is improved productivity with a wider vision and accessibility while also reducing the training time for the eclipse users. A plug in for Eclipse helps capture work outputs more proficiently by helping users to develop codes, perform unit testing using JUnit, create software build using ANT, and report the results instantaneously, all without leaving Eclipse IDE.

Using a Plug-in for Eclipse, facilitates the easy view of process tasks from within IDE, by working on them, and readily marking the tasks as “complete” when finished, etc. Without knowing it, they can become a part of the process, this way. There is better software quality as developers and testers also have ready real-time access to the Requirement management tools and Test Cases from within Eclipse IDE, and become more informed to do better coding and testing activities.

The scope of recording granular level information tends to be will be superior, as the stakeholders work from within their familiar IDE. An integrated omnibus can help convey data to a project Management resulting in greater visibility for the Project Managers on the overall status.

Eclipse Plug- offers an open and seamless integration framework with all essential ALM services like – collaboration, traceability, process automation, security, reporting and analytics built in a single repository. And using a plug-in for Eclipse ensures collaboration among the stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle.

Learn more about: integration tools, service request management