Integrating Tools For An Efficient Software Development Life Cycle

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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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.

Read more about- eclipse integration, quality center integration