Seamless Integration with Eclipse Plug-in
It is said that Eclipse is a boon for developers who want to use a single tool environment for doing primary development job and collaborating with other teams. Business Analysts, Architects, Project Managers and Testers, need to work together share information and it has become a challenge to ensure collaborative development environment for the stakeholders, irrespective of their geographic locations and roles. With a plug-in for Eclipse, there is collaboration among the stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle, seamless integration and synchronization among disparate Application Lifecycle Management tools. An organization, with a plug-in, can provide an improved platform to developers, and where its established processes, tools and practices can be seamlessly integrated.
How does a plug-in work?
Plug-in needs to be SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) based so that any organization can create its own plug-ins for their home-grown tools using the same open service API. Eclipse users, generally the developers, can hook up to TIDE or Tools Integrated Development Environment, by using authentic user credentials. As the data gets collected from integrated ALM tools, by means of these open APIs, the developers can then work on them as per given privileges.
A look at the various benefits
There are numerous benefits that an organization can enjoy by the eclipse integration of processes, tools and practices. These benefits include
* Enhanced Productivity
A plug-in for Eclipse broadens the vision and accessibility of Eclipse users (the developers and testers) to artifact items of integrated tools. It increases the productivity of Eclipse users to a great extent, and facilitates them to work efficiently within their familiar IDE. It also reduces a lot of training time for Eclipse users.
* Adept and Timely Data Capture
As developers are usually unwilling to leave their familiar IDE, a plug in for Eclipse helps capture work outputs more efficiently by helping users to develop codes, perform unit testing using.
* Process Participation Bettered
By using a Plug-in for Eclipse, developers can view the process tasks from within IDE easily, work on them, and readily mark the tasks as completed when finished and become a part of the process without actually knowing it.
* Superior Quality
Plug-in enables developers and testers to have ready real-time access to the Requirements and Test Cases from within Eclipse IDE. And consequently there is better software quality as they are more informed to do better coding and testing activities.
* Specific Metrics
A plug-in facilitates developers, testers and managers to capture more detail data like code analysis results, unit testing results, test coverage results, and build results and other detailed information.
* More Transparency
Plug-in for Eclipse allows developers and testers to report the progress regularly on their coding, testing, bug fixing and review tasks. As the stakeholders work from within their familiar IDE, the scope of recording granular level information tends to be will be superior.
A plug-in enables Eclipse developers to share information back and forth with other stakeholders from within their familiar Eclipse environment. With a plug-in, the access of Eclipse developers can be extended to other artifacts like – Requirement Management, Design Artifacts, Test Cases, Tasks and Defects that originate from diverse ALM tools.