Integration Tools: Systematic Management Of The Software Applications Life Cycle

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
Comment this article

The globalized environment with its demands and challenges have paved way for the development of a number of software applications customized as per industry requirements. The management of these applications throughout its lifecycle from development to release includes a number of processes and practices. The development of new technologies, infrastructure and platform has further paved way for the development and deployment of vast number of applications in the enterprises. Integration of these applications across various locations is a challenge faced by the modern day global organizations.

With the business needs constantly changing, the application integration has become even more demanding and complex, giving rise to the development of various integration tools. However, requirements management with its understanding of the core business process and integration scenarios, handles the organization’s short to long term integration ...
... needs. The first step towards a successful implementation of integrated application is defining objectives and is done with a proper understanding the business drivers and stakeholders and their interdependencies. Further, the next step in the process is the selection of the right integration tools and its deployment methods.

The application lifecycle management has three basic approaches to SDLC tool integration. These are:

* Point-to-point Integrated Multi Vendor Tools
* Single Vendor Integrated ALM Tools
* Multi-vendor Best of Breed Integrated ALM Tools

However, choosing the right integration technology in software development life cycle has its own advantages that are not found in the point-to-point tools or single vendor tools. The multi-vendor tools integration, manages to cut across the complex and costly integrations, and also overcomes the limitations of the other two approaches. With a significantly simpler development, this technology offers a number of benefits such as, investment protection, flexibility of integration rules, process automation without boundary and traceability with change impact analysis.

Besides facilitating third party integration tools with different vendors such as Eclipse integration, Subversion integration and TFS integration, it also supports simultaneous usage of multiple tools from multiple vendors in a single tool ecosystem. This allows freedom for the organizations to select from among the best available tools. Further, with the help of tool specific adapters, eclipse integration is used as a plug-in format and is seamlessly integrated into the IDE environment.

Read more on -ALM Tools, Subversion integration