Software Lifecycle Integration:

Integrate Your SDLC Tools and Accelerate Your Business

Introduction:

Software has become a key competitive differentiator in nearly every industry. This is why so many companies now recognize software development and delivery as a make-or-break business process that is key to growth and profit.

Unfortunately, many organizations fail to derive optimum value from their software development teams. There are delays and inefficiencies caused by poor collaboration and friction that results from disconnected tools and information silos.

Isn’t there a better way? A better way to exploit the investment in existing tools, a better way to streamline information flow, a better way to promote collaboration among different software lifecycle disciplines? Actually, there is.

Collaboration Challenges:

For many companies, competitive advantage hinges on creating innovative, high quality software. It’s therefore a smart business decision to optimize the software development process for improved time to market, better quality product, increased productivity, and reduced cost.

But although software development teams have great people, modern tools, and the latest methodologies, why do they still experience disconnects in process and collaboration? Either software is slow out the door, or there are too many defects that get into production. Even when the organizations realize that the development process is not optimal, they find it difficult to pin down what actions could make measurable improvements.

Process inefficiencies are not due to deficient tools. There are excellent application lifecycle management (ALM) tools for every phase of software development and delivery — specialized tools for requirements and project management, automated testing, model-driven deployment, and build. These improve individual productivity. But they are not designed to synchronize the process end-to-end.

In effect, all of these specialist tools have created silos of information within software development disciplines. A business analyst uses a requirements management tool, but all that important information remains within that tool. Testers do a great job developing their test plans and executing their test cases, but they need to access the requirements created by the business analyst to know what to test.

These information silos translate into disjointed teamwork. Teams do not work together because their specialized tools are not integrated. Collaboration is stymied because information does not flow seamlessly from team to team. There is a lack of visibility across the entire workflow.

This can cost the organization in numerous ways:

• Reduce capacity to innovate because data is trapped within information silos
• Inefficiencies caused by the need to manually reenter information in different systems, or to use emails, spreadsheets and frequent status meetings to share information.
• Reduced productivity because individuals act on old, incomplete information, or spend time trying to find the most up-to-date information.
• Costly delays in delivery, including being slow to act on customer requests.
• More defects in production releases including improperly implemented requirements, causing financial loss, lost opportunities, or embarrassment.

The Solution: Software Lifecycle Integration

Clearly, organizations must unite their disconnected software delivery disciplines if they are to increase quality and productivity and benefit from the latest methodology innovations, such as scaled Agile, Lean Software, and DevOps. All of these initiatives require automated integrations of tools to eliminate friction points and to enable teams to work with the same information in near real time. Additionally, emerging platforms, such as mobile, cloud, and open source ensure that heterogeneous tool stacks will continue to be with us. Integration among these tools is a must.

Reporting is not just important for the purposes of delivering the project, but also to ensure that the project conforms to corporate requirements. Supporting compliance often requires cross-tool traceability and reporting. The cross-organizational infrastructure necessary to connect the practice of software delivery should include an integration architecture, process monitoring, measurement, and reporting.

Historically, software development teams attempt to solve disciplinary disconnects through workarounds, first through ad-hoc collaboration, such as email and then through manual duplication, took import/export, or custom-built data meetings, and then through manual duplication, tool import/export, or custom-built data synchronization utilities. For most organizations, these strategies are ineffective. They don’t create conflict-free synchronizations, they fail to manage the impact of continual changes caused by tool updates, they can’t reconcile disparate artifact types and the relationships among artifacts, and therefore don’t improve overall performance and scalability.

Unlike piecemeal integration solutions, true software lifecycle integration solutions should:

• Connect all software development and delivery tools
• Synchronize information across disciplines
• Unlock cross-discipline value through shared information
• Give practitioners real-time access to the changes other team members are making in their tools
• Improve visibility across the entire project team for traceability and compliance
• Enable end-to-end reporting

Why Tasktop?

Tasktop provides the definitive integration solution. It works in the background, keeping the flow of information among the practitioners and their tools constant. As business integrate more systems, they add that system to the Tasktop integration bus through a straightforward configuration process. This eliminates cumbersome point-to-point integrations and ineffective manual integration methods, such as bulk transfer of data and manual re-entry. The result is a more robust infrastructure that reduces the cost and risk of the deployment.

Consider these Tasktop benefits:

• Increased capacity and throughput- Information flows automatically from one stakeholder to the next, removing manual and non-value added work, increasing collaboration, and reducing errors. Your teams will be able to get more done and team members will actually become more engaged.
• Greater lifecycle visibility- Synchronizing artifacts across tools ensures that their reports are enriched with the most up-to-date data from the other tools. But Tasktop can do more than synchronize artifacts across the lifecycle; Tasktop can also record all the activity streams on these artifacts into a single database. Once these activity streams are recorded, organizations can create dashboards and reports that provide pan-lifecycle metrics (such as end-to-end cycle times) and cross-tool traceability reports.
• Remove hidden expense and risk- By not employing an enterprise-grade integration strategy, your organization is forced to engage in costly work arounds. Manual exchange of information using bulk exports/imports; long email threads and meetings; manually correlating data to create lifecycle and traceability reports; and attempts at creating point-to-point integrations yourself are shockingly expensive, yet this cost is largely hidden from view. In addition, any rollout of a new tool, or a new version of an existing tool, poses inherent risk. Running a new version of an existing tool in parallel with the current version, as well as integrating a brand-new tool with the rest of the toolchain, will reduce this risk.
• Ease of deployment- Tasktop can be used for large-scale deployments and complex cross-discipline workflows. It does not require extensive training for admins to learn how to configure the integrations, and is transparent to the end-users of the integrated tools. New tools and new versions of existing tools are easily accommodated.

Summary

Tasktop provides fully automated, enterprise-grade integration among the individual tools used by software development organizations. The result: a simple and powerful way to connect these tools, share the artifacts they create, and improve collaboration among all team members.

By integrating the tools each discipline uses and by flowing artifacts across ALM application boundaries, Tasktop tears down the tool silo around each functional discipline, while preserving investments in existing tool infrastructure. Practitioners operate more efficient because they access the most current information shared among all stakeholders in the software delivery supply chain. Management gets better visibility and governance across the entire lifecycle.

Tasktop enables businesses to unleash the full capabilities of their software development and delivery teams, drive innovation, and build differentiating value for their companies.