The paper describes the need for and goals of tool-integration within software development processes. In particular we focus on agile software development but are not limited to. The integration of tools and data between the different domains of the process is essential for an efficient, effective and customized software development. We describe what the next steps in the pursuit of integration are and how major goals can be achieved. Beyond theoretical and architectural considerations we describe the prototypical implementation of an open platform approach. The paper introduces platform apps and a functionality store as general concepts to make apps and their functionalities available to the community. We describe the implementation of the approach and how it can be practically utilized. The description is based on one major use case and further steps are motivated by various other examples.
Meanwhile, Frantz and Corchuelo @cite_7 refer to integration in the business (EAI) context. But, they state important facts that also apply to integration of the software development process. They see need for integration in order to be able to reuse software components (or tools) and for adapting or optimizing IT to the needs of (business) processes, while we emphasize workflows within the software development process. Further, they introduce their own EAI framework to compare it to other existing ones like Spring Integration or Camel. With regard to the goal to provide simple tool integration and development mechanisms, we consider the approach to be not sufficient to serve as an integration environment for software development processes. In particular the use of message pattern to detach data from integrated applications can be problematic. This means, messages have to be routed through the integration environment and translated into the application specific data model format. Using message buses to decouple systems is a general EAI pattern, which we explicitly avoid by mapping directly on a generic meta model understood by all applications using our platform.
@cite_7
2043404089
Typical companies rely on their software ecosystems to support and optimise their business processes. There are a few proposals to help software engineers devise enterprise application integration solutions. Some companies need to adapt these proposals to particular contexts. Unfortunately, our analysis reveals that they are not so easy to maintain as expected. This motivated us to work on a new proposal that has been carefully designed in order to reduce maintainability efforts.