Integrating Tools And Apps With Application Lifecycle Management

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Technological innovation is a continuous process and with every new technology comes in the demands for up gradation of the IT infrastructure of the organization. However, with new applications inducted into the organizations, the legacy applications also need to co-exist and at times be integrated for the benefit of the organization. Further, the professionals working on various applications need to follow an application development lifecycle before it actually gets deployed.

The advent of globalized corporate environment has led to the software development teams located at different regions to be working on the same applications. Hence, the application lifecycle management process thus requires automated tools to control the information flow in an integrated environment. The development of the integration bus for IT has helped resolved the challenges faced by the global organizations. Equally applicable to the local enterprises too, this enterprise service bus provides a neutral platform and adapters for integration of the application lifecycle management tools.

The ...
... integration bus thus facilitates the organizations to make use of the tools for requirements management, test management and application management and also ensures lifecycle transparency across macro and micro level process automation. Further, the integration of application management tools can be done either with the help of point-to-point integrated multi-vendor tools, single vendor integrated ALM tool or multi-vendor integrated ALM tools. The enterprise integration bus facilitates simultaneous usage of multiple tools from multiple vendors in a single tool ecosystem, allowing the organizations to choose the best-of-breed tools as per requirements. The ALM middleware approach based integration tools paves way for a simpler development and overcomes any limitations.

The integration bus or the enterprise service bus features a 2-way synchronization and federation support system, synchronization of data relations between objects besides its ability to integrate multiple tools for the development of the applications lifecycle. A service oriented architecture based system; this has a user-friendly web interface. Further, to enable data sharing, with any third party products, the integration bus uses adapters for integrating the requirement management tool, QC integration adapters for integrating quality center and global application lifecycle. Others include Sharepoint adapters, Eclipse adapters and perforce adapters for change management.

The ESB architecture based integration bus with its ability to create dashboard metrics and real-time analysis reports, is a valuable tool for cross tool processes and a bi-directional one for TFS. These integrations aid in increased communication and efficient workflow between collaborated teams involved in the process of application lifecycle management.

Read more about- IT Service Management, Tfs Integration