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.
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. In this position paper we argue that to effectively address coordination challenges in distributed software development, we need to go beyond making individual development tools more collaborative and design a framework that enables common understanding of the information from different tools and supports loose coupling between them. Stakeholders can go about doing their work in their choice of tools, and as long as these tools adhere to certain interface requirements imposed by the framework, information may be shared across tools in a seamless fashion. The framework should also be able to pick up on cues within the project execution environment, analyze them, and provide useful information as alerts and advisories to stakeholders. Finally, the framework should be adaptive to new tools introduced in the development process as well as to changing project governance needs. We present a preliminary architecture of the framework and discuss candidate technologies to realize it.