Understanding OSLC Integration and its benefits
Software development life cycle (SDLC) or application development lifecycle involves different stages and phases such as initiation, system concept development, planning, requirements analysis, design, development, integration, testing, implementation, maintenance and disposition. For managing and supporting these phases, companies and organizations use variety of tools (that can be open source, purchased or proprietary) from multiple vendors and open source providers. The tools that include IBM RequisitePro, ClearQuest, ClearCase, Enterprise Architect, HP Quality Center, Microsoft TFS, SharePoint, Visual Studio, Eclipse IDE, Atlassian Jira, Perforce, CA Clarity, Subversion and Hudson are the best of breed tools. However, these tools are siloed point function tools, which leave the different stakeholders such as business analysts, architects, developers, testers and managers with no idea regarding the overall application development activities and status.
Almost all companies and organizations have an application development environment that is fragile and this is because of the lack of effective collaboration and synchronization between the different practitioner tools. And the result of such a fragile environment is limited traceability, wasted effort and time, unstable integrations, lower productivity, poor quality and unsatisfactory software delivery. This led to the development of Open Service for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) initiative to facilitate effortless integration between disparate tools. OSLC is divided into different workgroups namely Quality Management, Requirements Management, Software Configuration management, Change Management, Build Automation and so on.
OSLC was formalized in 2009 and the first workgroup to be formed was the Change management workgroup. It involved individuals from IBM, Accenture, Eclipse Mylyn/Tasktop and so on. Today there are many such workgroups formed around other lifecycle stages and includes individuals from more than 30 different organizations including Siemens, Tieto, Oracle, General Motors, and Northrop Grumman.
Thanks to OSLC integration, life has become easier for software and product developers and tool vendors as Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has become less daunting and complex. By standardizing the way in which the lifecycle tools can share data, OSLC integration has made it possible for the various high breed disparate software lifecycle tools to collaborate easily.
The following are some of the benefits of OSLC integration.
* Implement leaner and more agile processes
* Reduce costs
* Companies can increase the value they produce
* Improve business results
* Facilitate enhanced traceability across artifacts and every step in a process chain
* Save considerable time and effort
* Facilitate easy and effortless integration.
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