Jamie Wetzel, Tasktop
Is your organization maturing and considering integration to connect its software delivery disciplines to increase productivity and reduce cycle times?
Software Lifecycle Integration (SLI) is an emerging discipline within the ALM space. It is often driven by the creation of Testing or QA Centers of Excellence (COE), and it provides the automated traceability, collaboration, visibility & reporting needs of Enterprise ALM/SDLC, particularly when paired with tools from multiple vendors are used in different functional areas such as Requirements Management, PMO, Development, Helpdesk, and Agile.
Historically, either manual-duplication, import/export or rudimentary home grown/vendor-provided “synchronizers” have been used to address these integration needs, but for most organizations, the overhead of implementing and maintaining such integrations and the challenges associated with ensuring correct syncs, reconciliation of disparate workflows and overall performance issues is just too much. Other options include third-party plugins to one end point system being integrated, but this can create excessive overhead performance and scalability limitations.
The SLI data model defines a new kind of ALM architecture that supports lean software lifecycles based on social tasks and contexts. SLI’s integration hub provides a central point of administration and control, extensibility to support a variety of integration patterns, and connectivity between tools from many different vendors. It is the most effective way to provide scalable, high performing integrated ALM/SDLC infrastructures.
If your answers to the following questions point your organization towards integration, Tasktop may be able to help you integrate your ALM tool stack using Software Lifecycle Integration:
- To what level of criticality has the need for software lifecycle integration evolved in your organization?
- Is the need recognized by both executive/program management and the tools/technical team? If so, is there a gap in the perceived criticality?
- If ALM/SDLC integration needs are acknowledged, how many projects and personnel need to push/pull data from the connected systems?
- What use cases/integration patterns are seen as most beneficial/valuable to implement?
