Things That Oslc Integration Can Do

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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Simply put, OSLC is an Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration group. In practice, people mostly use it as a generic term for every element that conforms to multiple OSLC defined standards for software development tools. Here, the general idea is to have a set of rules or standards as to how the software development tools represent and share their data with other tools and also with the world. A well defined standard enables customers and vendors to concentrate on the abilities of tools more rather than how the tools will communicate and incorporate with each other. This becomes the foundation for Collaborative Lifecycle Management that IBM prefers to emphasize with every aspect of software development sharing data. This in turn helps to automate and simplify the processes. This is how OSLC integration works.
For instance, email functionality is a component that is considered as a tool by software developers and it has an OSLC interface defined for it. There are numerous vendors who offer this email ...
... service for consumers. There is hotmail, Gmail, yahoo and many more. As each of them supports OSLC interface for email, they are considered as OSLC providers. This means each of these are considered to be a web service offering the ability for its consumers.

What does OSLC integration do?
Today eminent companies dealing in Application lifecycle management solutions have introduced OSLC integration solutions. The benefits they offer are:-

Allow users to browse the list of requirements, test cases, work items, and sets up results and defects from OSLC consumer tool such as IBM RTC
Any of the above artifacts contained can be linked in multiple tools in the context of requirement, test case and changed item. Users are able to see a preview of the artifact along with live data arising from the source tool
Consumers can set up new artifacts
As these artifacts are worked on by various stakeholders, consumers of OSLC consumer tools are able to follow the updated statuses, comments and activities
Consumers can update artifacts and collaborate with other stakeholders

Any OSLC enabled consumer tools such as RRC and IBM RTC can connect to multiple ALM tools comprising Microsoft TFS, HP Quality Center, Atlassian Jira and SharePoint through OSLC linking. Any ALM artifact in IBM RTC can possess a live link to any artifact in Microsoft TFS. Companies offering OSLC integration are presently enabling OSLC specifications for Quality Management, Change Management and Requirement Management.

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