Introduction

Kovair, a technology leader in the domain of Integrated Applications Lifecycle Management – ALM offers several solutions such as Requirements Management, Test Management, Issues and Change Management. Kovair is known for its following four technology value propositions, no matter what specific application or solution you want to build with it. 100% web based solution that supports multiple major browsers IE, Firefox, and Chrome with no client-side software installation. Drag and drop interface and easy codeless configuration of desired applications making it a very viable and flexible long-term investment having very high ROI. An excellent Task based, built-in Process, or Workflow Engine called the ‘Omniprocess’ that allows to configure and maintain any business process within the tool using a drag and drop visual designer. A SOA architected Enterprise Service Bus ‘Omnibus Integration Platform’. It facilitates integration of different tools or software by building thin adapters for each of them. It also allows bidirectional data transfer between the tools. Other than just synchronization of records between tools, Omnibus also allows synchronization of relationships, comments and attachments associated with each and every record. With the above basics of Kovair succinctly outlined, let us focus on the value propositions of the Enterprise Integration Bus – the Omnibus Integration Platform in this particular paper.

The Omnibus Integrations

Almost every organization has separate teams for working on different phases of application development. These teams work in silos and prefer to use their own set of tools popular in their own domain. This has made all the phases disjointed from each other and has made the process of tracking and maintaining the progress of a release very tough. Kovair helps to resolve this communication issue in two dimensions. For seamless communication between multiple phases of Application Lifecycle Development, Kovair offers a 100% web based single data repository where data of all phases can be maintained, traced and tracked for better predictability and ensuring quality at every step. However, this is not the case in real life as most organizations use best-of-breed tools from multiple vendors which seldom have interconnectivity and data transferability unless point to point integrations are carried out. Even different tools from the same vendor are not typically connected with each other. Here the second dimension of Kovair’s integration capability comes into play.

To eliminate the need for point-to-point integrations – where integrating 5 different tools requires 10 total integrations, Kovair developed the SOA based Omnibus technology. In a bus or hub like architecture for integrations, 5 tools integrations would require only 5 adapters, thus bringing in considerable savings in both the development and maintenance costs during upgrade to the newer version of the tools. Kovair’s Omnibus Integration Platform is technology, vendor and location agnostic. This means Kovair can be integrated with other tools that may be using Oracle database or running on a Linux platform, or are in different locations. Kovair’s web based architecture facilitates remote communication and collaboration among tools and their users. In today’s multi-location and outsourced development environment, it is necessary that a Requirements Management tool based in Boston communicates with a Test tool based in Bangalore. The Omnibus Integration Platform is very capable of delivering on this essential need. The following figure provides a visual representation of multiple integrations from Kovair that can be described as “Kovair Model” for ALM.

The Competitive Edge

SOA based ESB architected Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform is backed up by a 100% web based central repository system. This gives manifold advantages to Omnibus in comparison to other competitors. The uniqueness of Kovair Omnibus Integrated platform is given below.

• Proprietary SOA based ESB architected integration platform
• Task and Web based Automated, Graphically Configurable Workflow with Notification, Eliminating manual hand-offs
• Policy engine allowing users to configure business rules for –
  • Event based actions
  • Sending notifications o Perform scheduled activities
  • Escalate information
• Helps to achieve cross tool End-to-End Traceability
• Built-In Cross Tool Data Based Real-Time Reporting and Dashboards increases predictability and quality of a release.

Summary

For organizations having prior investments in multiple tools from vendors such as IBM, HP and Microsoft, Kovair offers an excellent value proposition to enhance ROI in two major ways. The first one is by providing the capabilities to integrate tools from any one of these or other vendors at a relatively low cost. The second one is by filling out certain gaps in point tools that may not exist at these companies. Kovair has a complete list of existing and planned integration adapters on its website.

Introduction

Application development organizations spend millions of dollars a year on a multitude of siloed point function tools encompassing requirement management, design/architecture management, coding, configuration management, build, testing, defect tracking, release management, and more. These tools live in isolation which makes users rely mostly on traditional and broken manual procedures while synchronizing data of one tool with the other. These isolated tools do not play well together, therefore, cannot provide a coherent development setup. You may also find some point-to-point fragile and hardwired integrations between tools in organizations that commit to a single provider for sourcing all their required tools. Organizations that choose best-of-breed tools from different vendors, suited to different lifecycle phases also lack an effective integration mechanism in their tool setup. Here are the ten compelling reasons why an organization must connect these multiple lifecycle tools and achieve an optimum application development environment for its teams.

1. Gain Greater Insight

Lack of data visibility into day-to-day activities of an application development project is a big problem for all stakeholders. Business Analysts, Architects, Developers, Testers, and Managers – all work in a very isolated manner using different tools and have limited information about the overall application development activities and status. It is important that developers and testers have the ability to ensure code quality and performance throughout the lifecycle process. This needs quality of work to be validated at every stage and defects to be identified and removed early in the process, not at the end of it. In a non-synchronized development environment, achieving an end-to-end visibility of tool-specific information is a big challenge. All these tools need to be connected to unlock the hidden data and enable all the project stakeholders to share the same pool of up-to-date information real time. A connected ecosystem of tools allows every individual, team, and organization to gain greater insight into the application development, thus helping them to do their job in a much better and informed way. Efficiency can only be achieved through full visibility into projects, people, costs, and items across the lifecycle.

2. Enact Best Practice Processes

Organizations, developing software applications find it very difficult to set up an integrated and uniform engineering process across SDLC stages, when the tools used by stakeholders at different stages are disconnected. Without an interconnected set of tools, it is almost impossible to integrate the above engineering processes carried out in different practitioner tools and more than likely, distributed at the multiple locations. Paper-based processes are commonly used to control handoffs between functional areas. Integrated engineering process automates these handoffs and ensures proper communication, synchronization, and feedback exchange between these stage level processes. These are essential for any successful application development. Organizations establish several best-practice processes like Requirements Validation, Code Review and Verification, Test Coverage for Requirements, Build Verification, Risk identification and mitigation, Check for Release Readiness, Change Management, and more spanning one or more lifecycle stages and tools. Connecting the tools is a must for an organization to disseminate, implement, and automate its methodology and best practice processes universally across the lifecycle tools so that the methodology becomes a natural part of the organization’s business process. Automated and executable process models used across these integrated set of tools ensure strict process adherence and achieve consistency, repeatability, and predictability. Corporations face the daunting task of ensuring effective compliance requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley, CMMI, ITIL, ISO, Six Sigma, and others. Compliance requirements make the overall traceability across all application lifecycle items a necessity, which is practical only if lifecycle tools are connected to each other. Organizations need an environment, where these compliance efforts can be automated and built into the process throughout the application development stages in order to achieve sustainable compliance.

3. Overcome Challenges for Globally Distributed Development

Today, the Application development process is more global than ever. Projects increasingly involve multiple teams in disparate locations, often from multiple companies and countries. Enterprise level organizations often encounter a situation, where even for the same lifecycle domain people from different companies/countries with different cultures participate in application development process. It is often the case that one company using DOORS for Requirements definition and Perforce for SCM needs to work with another partner company using RequisitePro for Requirements and ClearCase for SCM. The challenge here for an enterprise is to accommodate different cultural and tools, yet remain connected in such a way that work is not duplicated, productivity is not sacrificed, and cross-cultural miscommunication is minimized. This is crucial, especially with many global business consolidations happening for enterprises. Here the situation is even more complicated by the fact that people using different lifecycle tools are not sharing the same network, and their tools are behind the firewall in different networks. You will need a modern framework integrating tools behind firewalls across different networks that overcomes the structural challenges of working across remote locations, and ensures project outcome – on time, on budget, and on target with business goals.

4. Enable Collaboration between Stakeholders

Organizations need to provide real-time collaboration and coordination between the various functional teams, including customer, product team, development team, QA team and the testing team by seamlessly integrating different development tools and processes that best fit their needs. Performing all these above activities in collaboration is possible, only when stakeholders’ tools are connected together. The integration ensures that all stakeholders during application development are in sync and perfect synergy. They share equal visibility into the development artifacts, activities, and project status. Their individual and team activities are synchronized with others and aligned with the ultimate project goals. They don’t waste time on manual syncing up of tasks and bloated meeting schedules. They feel unified and take accountability for the success or failure of the whole application development.

5. Increase Productivity & Deliver Faster

Connecting the tools used by different stakeholders throughout the application lifecycle stages brings huge opportunities for increasing the productivity of individuals and teams.

• Integration enables implementing and enforcing best practice processes and proven methodologies that drive improvement in productivity.
• Shorter development cycle and quicker software delivery decrease inter-stage transition time.
• Teams can collaborate more efficiently and effectively, eliminating human errors and delivery delays.
• Business analysts, architects, developers, testers, and project managers are able to carry out most of their application development activities using their preferred tools environment without requiring them to learn and use new tools. This saves a lot of training time for stakeholders.
• Reduce inflated meetings, travel time, phone calls and unwanted rework by keeping all the stakeholders in sync and sharing the up-to-date information.
• Automation of repetitive and tedious tasks saves a lot of time and effort.
• Enable productivity improvement by analyzing trends and implementing metrics-based best management practices.

6. Enhance Customer Satisfaction

Integrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) breaks down the developer/customer barrier, enables rapid delivery of customer-driven value, and results in better customer satisfaction.

• Integration enables business stakeholders and developers to collaborate seamlessly with the customers around common shared artifacts. This provides the opportunity to understand customer needs and expectations better.
• Best-practice processes adopted throughout the lifecycle stages constantly ensure that all the development activities are aligned with the ultimate customer requirements. Customers get exactly what they have asked for.
• Improved quality achieved through the integration helps to deliver a better product to the customer that works for their business.
• Customer gets real-time updates on the application development progress and status because of the increased transparency and visibility into the lifecycle stages. Software quality and reliability are the lifelines to customer loyalty.
• Integration facilitates quick response to customer requests and requirements with the support of an end-to-end traceability of lifecycle artifacts across the stages, and integrated change management process.
• Integration with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Help Desk tools provides a transparent view of the progress of customer cases to all stakeholders, including customer support managers, sales, and the entire software development team. This helps organizations to be on the top of every customer issue.
• Customer will instantly know the status of issues and when the fixes will be deployed.

7. Improve Quality

Integrating the application development lifecycle tools has direct and indirect influences on the overall quality of a software product. It improves quality by reducing the number of defects due to miscommunication, identifying inconsistencies between requirements, enabling efficient testing, and generally ensuring that the final application meets the needs and expectations of users. Quality is the sum total of effectiveness, efficiency, and visibility.

• Accomplishing tasks with a quality outcome often requires wider vision and an extended access to related information/knowledgebase. In an IT environment, linked information from disparate tools needs to be exposed to the right stakeholders at the right time – for them to come up with ‘Quality’. This plays a big role behind the success of IT projects. With integration in place, architects, developers, and testers have ready and real-time access to the lifecycle artifacts from within their own tool. Hence, they become more informed to do better design, coding, and testing activities. All these result in a better quality software.
• Integration ensures code quality and performance throughout the lifecycle processes. Quality of work is validated at every stage, and defects are caught during the process, instead of at the end of it.
• Enforce and automate some of the best practice quality verification processes like code analysis, unit testing, checking code coverage, continuous build verification, root cause analysis, and more by integrating the relevant tools. Capture these detailed test results/defects to analyze and take smarter decisions to improve quality. Strong analytics help users to anticipate problems before they actually arrive.
• Better change management practices help to minimize quality issues arising out of changes in requirements, designs, and code files. Understanding change dependencies and impacts are the key to optimize quality.

8. Collect Actionable Metrics & Intelligence

Organizations are finding it increasingly difficult to get the facts needed to build an up-to-date and reliable picture of application development projects, and then obtain accurate measures against business goals, and deliver simple actionable intelligence. Typically, in the absence of an automated metrics collection program across the disconnected lifecycle tools, managers rely on team members to provide these inputs, and the result is a bunch of inconsistent, imprecise, subjective, static, non–granular, and hard-to-collate information. The absence of factual insights leads to missed deadlines, budget crunch, and fundamental erosion of trust and goodwill in a business relationship. Companies waste millions of dollars each year in project overruns, cancellations, and missed business goals. Senior managers often come across situations where finding answers to the following questions becomes a thing of nightmare. Do you feel that the answers are not easily forthcoming? You need an automated metrics collection system integrated across application development lifecycle tools. This will provide you a decision intelligence solution that delivers relevant, objective, dynamic and granular metrics needed to make smart decisions influencing cost, quality, and time.

9. Manage Change with Confidence

Change is inevitable in any application development project. Embracing and managing change properly is a major challenge. Organizations find it difficult to keep all stakeholders in sync with the latest changes in application development and ensure the smooth change propagation through lifecycle silos. In the process, inconsistent information creeps in, resulting in wasted effort, productivity loss, incorrect delivery, and customer dissatisfaction. To deal with the above scenarios, what we need is an end-to-end multi-directional traceability between the lifecycle artifacts and deliverables like requirements, models, source code, build scripts and test cases getting generated throughout the application development stages by different stakeholders using different tools. Organizations find it challenging to correlate application lifecycle items when they are maintained in isolated tools by people from different functional areas. Without an end-to-end traceability, enterprises will continue to deliver applications that diverge through the lifecycle from the original requirements. A connected set of lifecycle tools makes it easier for the application development teams to better assess the impact of changes, track the full history, automate change propagation, and thus keep everyone on the same page and reduce change reaction time. This integration framework has to be flexible enough to support all of the above integration requirements. You should be able to plug any tool from any vendor any time to your integrated tools ecosystem and follow your best practice process irrespective of the tools chosen.

10. Plug and Play tools

Organizations invest heavily on buying the best-of-breed tools for different lifecycle stages and for training people about these tools. However, this does not allow them to harness the full potential of these tools and get the most value out of their investments. Integrating all or most of these tools can help you achieve an end-to-end ALM solution resulting in increased ROI, and process improvement. You need a comprehensive integration framework that can accommodate your existing tools and processes and don’t require you to retool your current processes, or to commit to a particular tool vendor.

Conclusion

You have purchased the best tools money can buy to make your development process more effective. You have trained your people in these expensive tools. But, you are not getting the most value out of these investments. You don’t have a consolidated picture of your whole development projects, but only the pieces of the puzzle. You saw the great opportunities you have to achieve substantial savings in time and effort, and to ensure consistent quality by integrating the tools in your software engineering environment. With Kovair, you can have a single unified, automatically synchronized software engineering and collaboration system that avoids tool silos causing inconsistent information and inefficient processes. The net result is a better synchronization between IT and your business, delivering an enhanced business value to your customer and a competitive advantage.

Different Approaches for Integrated ALM

To address the challenges of Integrated ALM and to achieve at least some of the goals, different tool vendors have taken different strategies, which can be broadly categorized in the three alternative approaches.

Approach #1: Point-to-point Integrated Multi-Vendor Tools

Traditionally the individual vendors have tried to achieve modicum of Integrated ALM by first integrating their own ALM point tools and then integrating some selection of the popular point tools from other vendors. The advantage of such an approach is the simplicity. You need to create only the integration between a particular pair of tools if necessary. However, to achieve the functionality and benefits mentioned above, it is necessary to have point-to-point integration between most, if not every pair of tools. Moreover, since the integration is often done between tools from two different vendors, it often becomes the users’ responsibility to create a workable integration using their own development resources. This results in additional internal tool maintenance and management resources, which are not aligned to the core competency of the organization.

The primary issues with the point-to-point approach are discussed below:

Complexity of combinations From high-school algebra, we know that to have a point-to-point integration between every pair of n tools we need n x (n-1) / 2 number of integrations. For a simple case of 5 tools, this amounts to 10 integrations and just by doubling the number of tools to 10 will result in a 4.5 fold increase in number of integrations to 45. Because of the ad-hoc nature of these integrations, it becomes extremely difficult to create and maintain each individual integration code between the pairs of tools.

Handcrafted Integration Business Rules Since each integration code is custom made for a particular pair of tools, it has the maximum flexibility but at the same time, maintenance becomes very difficult. For example, the business rules of integration like which field maps from one tool to the other, under which condition the data is replicated from one tool to another, or how a change in one tool will be reflected in another – are all hardcoded in the integration code. This means that any change in that logic necessitates changes in that code. Any change in code means a full cycle of development, test, and deployment cycle making it impossible to implement even the smallest change quickly.

Replacement Dilemma It is unlikely that a development group will use a single tool forever. With changing needs, technology and preferences, existing tools often need to be replaced by more effective alternatives. However, a point-to-point architecture becomes a hindrance to such an upgrade. Referring to our example of 5 and 10 tools scenarios, a single tool replacement will result in re-development of up to 4 and 9 integration codes respectively that often becomes the reason for perpetuation of old and inappropriate tool usage. These issues are resulting in some development groups abandoning their custom point-to-point integration projects. Even large service companies with enough in-house software expertise and bandwidth are looking for a replacement of their handcrafted internal integration rats-nest architecture with a more sustainable and scalable solution.

Approach #2: Single Vendor Integrated ALM Tools

Because of the problems faced by point-to-point integration architecture, large vendors like IBM and Microsoft have come up with their own solutions to the Integrated ALM. Though their solutions vary in actual implementation, they can be grouped in the category of ‘single vendor solutions’. While these solutions also aim at including third party vendor tools, the current implementations on the market do not meet these needs.

IBM’s solution consists of the Jazz integration technology and various tools created on Jazz platform. This includes Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, Rational DOORS, DOORS Next Gen and Rational Requirements Composer. Jazz has an open API, which allows third party vendors to integrate their tools with Jazz. One of the main challenges for Jazz users is its current incompatibility to an existing tool – both from IBM Rational and third party vendors. In fact IBM/ Rational has created a new Requirements Management and Elicitation tool called Requirement Composer even when they have two well established Requirements Management tools RequisitePro and Telelogic DOORS. Moreover, Jazz requirements make existing tools from other vendors incompatible unless they retrofit with Jazz compliant interfaces using OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) web services, an IBM proposed open standard. As of now, no other major tool vendor has adopted OSLC standard for their existing or future tools. On the other hand, Microsoft’s solution does not include any stand-alone integration technology. Centerpiece for Microsoft’s Integrated ALM solution is the Team Foundation Server (TFS). Like the Rational Team Concert from IBM, TFS includes project management, source control, continuous build and work item management. Comparable to the Eclipse IDE, Microsoft has their Visual Studio Team System along with the tools for modeling, coding and testing. Like IBM, Microsoft proposes that a development team should use all tools from Microsoft to achieve Integrated ALM, though there are scopes for integration of other vendor tools in future. As a result, Microsoft solution requires point-to-point integration for each 3rd party vendor tool with TFS and/ or Visual Studio. This results in similar problems discussed in the point-to-point integration solutions above. Any development group starting afresh and focused only on Java based development or .NET based development may benefit from using IBM/ Rational and Microsoft solutions respectively. However, for the vast majority of organizations with major investments in existing tools from various vendors and development in Java, .NET and other mixed technologies, neither the IBM nor the Microsoft solutions can be very appealing.

The primary issues with single vendor integrated ALM tools approach are recapped below:

1. Rip and Replace The requirement of replacing existing tools by a single vendor tools does not sit well with any development manager. Apart from the difficulty of economic justification for such a move, this results in retraining of the development team members in new tools, which may delay development projects unnecessarily .
2. One Size Fits All It is highly unlikely that built-in tools from a single vendor can serve the needs of a wide range of development groups. However, due to the very nature of the solutions, the users are forced to use these tools even when better and often less expensive (sometime free open source) tools are available and appropriate for their needs. For example, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System designer is a brand new tool without any maturity whereas, there are quite a few matured design tools available, which cannot be used in the Microsoft only environment. Similarly, there are many organizations using Perforce, Subversion, PVCS, CVS who will not be able to participate in the IBM only environment, since they do not use ClearCase or the new configuration management built-in Team Center.
3. Technology Islands of Development Single vendor tools create a technology island with little or no chance of working together. Groups developing in both .NET and Java simultaneously using Eclipse and Visual Studio will have severe problems adopting a single vendor approach. It will be difficult to meet any of the functionality and benefits mentioned above in scenarios like that. Though there are patches of integration bridges like integrating TFS to Eclipse by Teamprise (acquired by Microsoft), they are again essentially a point-to-point integration with all its unwanted baggage.

Approach #3: Multi-Vendor Best of Breed Integrated ALM Tools by ALM Middleware

Taking a cue from the integration solutions in other industries, most notably financial software, the concept of ALM middleware addresses all the Integrated ALM requirements squarely and offers some more while avoiding all issues and pitfalls mentioned with the other two approaches of point to point and single vendor integrations. The middleware technology is based on Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture, which has some distinct advantages over any point-to-point integration architecture. These advantages are discussed below:

1. Significantly simpler development To use the previous examples of 5 and 10 tools development environment, the ESB architecture needs 5 and 10 adapters respectively, just one per tool! This is substantially less than 10 and 45 custom integrations necessary for point-to-point architecture. Moreover, to replace one of 5 and 10 tools needs replacement of just one adapter, a far cry from the redevelopment of 4 and 9 integration codes respectively.
2. Protect Investments ALM Middleware is based on a standard set of web service based APIs. Without any special requirement on the tools, ALM Middleware can integrate tools from different vendors, including internally developed tools. This means all the tool investments by a development organization are protected.
3. Best Tools for Best Functions ALM Middleware allows integration of multiple tools from different vendors for the same function. For example, Requirements Management may be covered by any combination of tools from IBM/ Rational (RequisitePro, DOORS, Rational Requirements Composer), Microfocus/ Borland (Caliber-RM). What is even better, it can support simultaneous usage of multiple tools from multiple vendors in a single tools ecosystem. This allows organizations to select the best tools available in the market without locking themselves in a single vendor solution. The table below illustrates the increased flexibility with tool choices using ALM Middleware.
4. Flexibility of Integration Business Rules Integration business rules do change over time for various reasons, including changes in business conditions, group dynamics, and development methodologies. For example, how the Requirements will be replicated from IBM RequisitePro to HP Quality Center so that the Traceability relation created in Quality Center may change over time. Integrated ALM platform allows creation and management of these rules independent of the individual tool adapters. Unlike point-to-point and single-vendor integrations where the logic is hard coded in the integration codes, middleware adapters do not have any embedded business rules. The business rules are managed in middleware administrative module with visual interface for the empowered end users. This eliminates the necessity of development resources for changing the integration codes and reduces the change implementation time drastically from weeks to hours.
5. Traceability with Change Impact Analysis ALM Middleware makes it simple to create Traceability relation between artifacts from various tools. In case of Point-to-point integration where without a central framework only two tools are integrated at a time, there is no way to visualize and manipulate Traceability relations of three or more Artifacts in a single interface. But for ALM Middleware, a central framework allows flexible ways of creating and managing these relationships among multiple (more than a pair of) tools. Moreover, due to its flexibility in relationship management, ALM Middleware promotes multi-tool proactive and reactive change impact analysis. This is impossible to do both in point-to-point and single vendor integration solutions.
6. Process Automation without Boundary Typically, Implementing SDLC Processes for multi-tool ALM requires discipline of individual participants. Such a manual implementation of the process fails after a short time when individuals do not follow it due to high overhead and high cost of retraining for each small change. ALM Middleware, with its built-in process automation capability has a unique advantage of creating a cross tools process and automating that for a transparent no-overhead implementation with a much larger success potential. The typical example is a Requirement that starts life in a Requirements Management tool, is reviewed and approved by stakeholders in a Project Management tool, is implemented by a developer in an IDE, and tested by testers in a Test Management tool. ALM Middleware automates the whole process for all these users even when they are using different tools and may be based at different locations.
7. Analytics and Dashboards Once ALM Middleware has all the artifacts and meta information about the artifacts (e.g. not just the Requirement but the information about the Requestor, Type, Priority, Approval status, Approver, Lifecycle status…) in its repository either by replication (where the artifact information is replicated to ALM Middleware repository) or federation (where the tool data is retrieved on demand, avoiding replication), one can create all sorts of dashboard metrics and reports for those data in real-time. These reports give valuable insight about the whole cross-tool process, which is often impossible or difficult to get.

A Comparison of the 3 Approaches

Item	Point-to-point Integrated Multi Vendor Tools	Single Vendor Integrated ALM Tools	Multi Vendor Best of Breed Integrated ALM Tools –ALM Middleware
View artifacts managed by one Tool from another Tool	Fair Only artifacts of the paired tool	Good Artifacts in the IDE and other paired tools	Excellent All artifacts through the ALM Middleware interface
Create various impacting and non-impacting relationship between any two Artifacts.	Fair Only artifacts of the paired tool	Good Artifacts in the IDE and other paired tools	Excellent All artifacts through the ALM Middleware interface
Automate a process cutting across the tool Boundaries and implementing the complete ALM lifecycle without a break	Poor	Poor	Excellent With built-in process automation in the ALM Middleware interface
Manage Projects and Resources across the tools	Poor	Fair Through integrated project management tool (if such an integration exists)	Excellent With built-in project and resource management in the ALM Middleware interface or external tool
Create Cross tools Analytics and Dashboards	Fair Through reporting tool with custom integration	Fair Some limited built-in analytics based on individual tools’ reporting capability.	Excellent With built-in reporting and analytics tool on all artifacts and meta information available in the ALM Middleware interface

 

Executive Summary

According to the PMBOK definition “A project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to accomplish a unique product or service with a defined start and end point and specific objectives that, when attained, signify completion”. By the year 1990 onwards almost every industry started the practice of project management to overcome the hurdles of managing – Budget, Tasks, Time, and Resources. Now the question is – What do we mean by Project Management? According to the PMBOK definition “Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques applied to project activities in order to meet or exceed stakeholder needs and expectations from a project.” In general, it is the lack of efficient methodology or standard that is responsible for failure of a Project, and that is why various methodologies or approaches get evolved starting from traditional approach of Project Management to other disciplines like – Critical Chain Project Management, Extreme Project Management, Event Chain Methodology, PRINCE2, Process-based Management with different approaches.

Kovair Software Inc. comes with a web-based Project Management Solution to meet enterprise goals with wide array of in-built features like – cost estimation, automated process aligned to the business, managing resources, allocation of tasks to resources, timesheet to capture time details of task execution, reporting, and management visibility through Dashboard. Kovair Project Management also provides the facility to integrate the solution with third-party or vendor neutral solutions via its in-built Omnibus (Integration Bus for ITTM). Today, there are several Project Management tools available in the market claiming them as the best software to meet the demands of Project Managers or Business Heads. Apart from managing Tasks, Time and Resources effectively, Kovair also manages various phases that a Project comprises of – Requirements, Change, Test, Defect, Release, and others, and thus becomes a complete suite for the management of development projects. The objective of this paper is to explain each feature of Kovair Project Management Solution.

Three Constraints of Project Management

• Scope or Quality of the Project
• Schedule of the Project
• Cost per Resource involved in the Project

Challenge for the management is to define a Project, plan it accordingly to achieve the goal, follow-up the plan and deliver the job/service as per the agreements. The success of a Project mainly depends upon its planning – how best you can estimate and how efficiently you can follow the plan. When we talk about plan, the first thing that comes to mind is the "Date and Time" to start the Project and to complete it. The second important thing is a set of "Activities" or "Tasks" carried out by resources to attain all the granular level objectives that sum up to a Project. Finally, it is – "Resources" (mainly – human, capital, infrastructure) the tangible medium that directly participate in the lifecycle of a Project either by accomplishing certain activities or providing support to accomplish the activities by others.

Managing Tasks

Task Management broadly speaks about allocation of right Task to right resource at the right time. It is quite easy to manage Tasks and their follow-ups when you are working with limited resources, but as the organization grows with increase in the number of resources, it becomes necessary to go for a tool for managing the Tasks. Task Management is a component of Kovair application that you can have with all available solutions – Requirements Management, Test Management, Issue Management, Defect and Risk Management and Project Management.

Kovair allows manual and automated Task allocation for different stakeholders. Manual Tasks can be created by the Managers for their groups to work on them, and record the Time invested. On the other hand, automated Tasks are generated to the resources through Kovair’s in-built process engine. Administrators can configure different workflows/business processes through Kovair’s visual drag-drop designer. Process, in Kovair, is a series of automated activities that facilitates systematic and organized workflow management in a distributed environment. A "Workspace" level process is a broad process involving several processes running simultaneously at the entity level. You can design "Linear Process" or "Sophisticated Process" as per your need. A "Linear Process" contains series of operational steps and activities. A "Sophisticated Process", on the other hand, includes "Conditions", "Loops" and "Paths". The execution of a sophisticated process depends on the satisfaction of the "conditions", and the direction of the "Path" (Probable/ Else), as defined in the process.

Which Tasks will be allocated to whom, and when – are defined only once when designing a Process. On activation, Tasks are automatically generated to the respective owners as per the progression of workflow, and thereby reduces the risk of manual intervention in Task Management.

Some value added facilities of Kovair"s in-built Task Management:

• Automated and Customized Task-based Process along with the provision to create Tasks manually.
• Generate multiple Tasks for different resources and/or roles for a particular item of a Project. Project item can be anything like – Requirement, Test Case, Issue, Defect, Service Request, Incident, Problem, Change, and so on. Kovair also allows you to define parallel Tasks for same or different sets of resources. This is considered as a unique feature of Kovair Project Management solution. So you are free to implement and manage multiple Tasks independently and dependently.
• Design custom Task Forms with artifacts that you want to expose to resources who will accomplish the Task. Granular level securities can be imposed in the Task Form by restricting users to view or edit sensitive information that are exposed in the Task.
• One-click navigation to the record (Requirement, Test Case, Issue, and others) directly from within the Task Form. Kovair provides the facility to expose the item (for which you are generating Task) as a link on the Task Form. Often resources need further information on the record for which he/she is supposed to accomplish a Task. Such one-click access of record from the Task helps the resource to work independently and reduces spare dialogues among the workgroups.
• Impose assignment policies on the resources to accomplish the Task. The policies can be either one of three types – Queued Task, Individual Task, and One Task for All. Queued Tasks assign a Task for multiple resources at a time. The resource who first picks up the Task becomes it owners and responsible to accomplish it. Other resources who had been assigned that Task get relieved from doing the job. Individual Task assigns a Task to a set of resources with a policy that determines when the Task will be granted as "complete" considering the number of resources (in terms of count/percentage/condition) participated in accomplishing the Task. Finally, the last Task assignment policy – One Task for All assigns a Task to a set of resources, and all resources are equally responsible to accomplish the Task separately by their own.
• Under the integrated setup of Kovair application with other third party tools, you can synchronize the processes to workgroups working on different tool environments. So, keeping that in mind, Kovair provides the facility to expose cross-tool Tasks via Omnibus ESB with Kovair "plug-in" or adapter for the tool.
• Close association of Task with Timesheet – another component of Kovair application. It allows the resources to record Time against each Task.

Introduction

Kovair with its ALM – an Application Lifecycle Management product and Omnibus Integration tool- an SOA architected Enterprise Service Bus helps organizations to build up an integrated ALM environment using their existing tools used for different development phases. Kovair acts as a central repository for multiple data systems that allows organizations to achieve the following:

• Seamless bi-directional data flow between different tools
• Better visibility of data from a central location
• Cross-tool data based reports and dashboards increasing release predictability
• Cross-tool data based traceability to ensure coverage and better impact analysis
• Event or scheduled based notification for keeping the stakeholders updated
• Establishing a DevOps environment by integrating tools of different domains and vendors
• Establishing a centrally controlled task based workflow across tools

The capabilities of Kovair Omnibus has been recognized in many organizations and the ROI of an Integrated ALM environment has been proven from different stakeholders’ point of view. The qualitative and financial benefits acknowledged by the stakeholders have been described in the following sections. The data that are enumerated in the following sections have all been derived from the customer experiences. These act as a good guide for what can be expected in a given situation provided there are differences in the number of tools, locations, and the number of people involved in the projects.

Benefits of Having an Integrated Development Ecosystem

• Seamless flow of artifacts from one stage of development to the other reducing duplication of efforts in different tools and saving cost as well as time
• Synchronized Engineering and Quality Processes for Development that helps reducing bugs, avoiding rework, and minimizing costs
• Instant visibility across projects and stages so that information is locked not in individual tools but in a single consolidated data repository for every group to review and act upon
• Real-time traceability across the entire Software Development Lifecycle that enhances productivity by avoiding confusions between teams and reducing the number of meetings, phone calls, and travel hours
• Consolidated Reports & Dashboards enabling better management decisions for corrective actions in a prompt manner reducing time-to-market cycles
• Event and Scheduled based notifications decreasing inter-stage transition time and manual interactions
• Early warning for Release instability, thus eliminating or reducing potential delivery delays
• Better Change Management & Impact Analysis to embrace change with lower risk and cost

The financial impact of the above benefits are quantified below based on customer inputs as experienced. It must be pointed out that each customer may experience different results based on their starting level of project efficiency, productivity, and quality compared to some others. However, the following is a good guideline for estimating cost benefits and computing ROI for a typical development environment. The benefits have been quantified from different stakeholders’ point of view.

Developers

An integrated ALM environment setup using Kovair Omnibus helps to improve productivity and reduce cost of development in different ways as stated below. Some of the benefits that developers get through integration with other tools using Kovair Omnibus are as follows:

• Plug-in based integration for IDEs to view different artifacts of ALM “in place”
• An ability to initiate unit testing, code coverage, and code analysis from the IDE
• Traceability view of test artifacts and their execution status from the IDE allowing them to identify what % of code is being tested
• Ability to perform static code analysis from the IDE allowing to validate their code even before checking in
• Helps them in better understanding of features without much manual interaction and dependency on other team members
• Gives them real-time visibility of defects and related information raised against their code

Testers

Today, with the advent of agility and early-to-market philosophy, it is very important to have an integrated environment for testing. It reduces the longer test cycles making the test process much more efficient and helps in early detection of bugs in the entire process of delivery. Here are some of the benefits that testers get from an Integrated ALM platform using Kovair Omnibus.

• Allows testers to remain updated with real-time status of the development progress
• Keeps testers updated about information on Build status – content and defects
• Integration of automation testing tool allows testers to execute both manual and automated test scripts from one single location
• Enables real-time availability of multiple Test coverage statistics that helps in measuring progress of the ongoing testing activities
• Facilitates easy tracking of issues over time
  • Incoming vs. fixed
  • Source of issues over time
  • Issue severity over time
  • Issue disposition over time – analysis of triage decisions
  • An ability to detect convergence, or lack thereof
• Enables risk-based testing
• Provides traceability of testing back to use cases, requirements, design, other artifacts for higher project visibility

Front line Manager

Integrated ALM environment achieved through Kovair Omnibus not only improves the productivity and quality from individual team’s perspective but also improves the productivity and quality for the frontline managers. Below are some of the points to elaborate this thought.

• Continuous updates on project status any time, any where
• Better visibility of Team and individual performance irrespective of locations for managers
• Real-time update on conformance to the code quality metrics and industry standards
• End to end traceability allows managers to do better impact analysis of change on project releases thus helping to take them correct decision
• Real-time update of Project Health
• Notification at every stage and for every purpose helps managers to react fast to any problem in the delivery lifecycle
• More objective oriented project status
• Consolidated and real-time reports and dashboards for project efficiency measurement

Numeric Benefits

Productivity gain: Let us consider that a manager spends around 15 hours a week on different meetings with respect to the overall progress of a release and gathering information for generation of reports and creation of reports. With the facilities of real-time status update of progress, cross-tool data based reports and dashboards offered by Kovair, it has been observed that time involvement in these meetings and report creation reduces by 70% to 75% i.e. around 4.5 hours for a manager. Quality gain: The ability of having real-time cross-tool reports and dashboards, traceability, and central governance through task-based workflow cutting across different tools provide much better and informative control over the entire release progress. This leads to quality gains and timeline failure reductions at an estimated rate of 40% to 45%. A good amount of savings can be easily done based on the average size of the groups, their average compensation, and overhead costs.

Executives/Upper Management

Similar to other stakeholders, an integrated ALM environment also benefits Executives/Upper management to a large extent. Some of the major benefits are listed below:

• Actionable information flowing upward leading to a quick strategic resolution
• Early warning for trouble resulting in fewer surprises that may otherwise arise at a later stage of the project
• Much more accuracy and consistency in reporting across projects and disciplines due to their real-time availabilities
• Task based workflow with notification keeping all stakeholders updated with necessary information which allows to implement a central governance for better control of a release

Support for CI and DevOps

In order to meet the challenge of getting early to the market, more and more organizations are moving towards DevOps. However, purchasing new tools to achieve this is a huge challenge for organizations that have already invested on different tools. Kovair Omnibus, with its large set of more than 60+ COTS tool integration helps organizations to achieve DevOps environment without supplanting any existing tool. Kovair has integration with many best-of-breed tools for different development phases supporting CI and DevOps. The

Introduction

Enterprise application integration remains an age-old challenge for software product and project development. The emergence of new technologies for hosting infrastructure, platform, and software across locations, including on-premise, managed, and cloud-based data centers make integration process even more demanding and complicated. The traditional application integration approaches do not meet the challenges of changing business needs and therefore, pose threats to the agility and flexibility of an organization. Application integration, if done properly with the right choice of technology and best practice considerations, can deliver an immense strategic and technical value. How an enterprise pursues application integration practices, can really make a difference between a project’s pitfall and success. In this paper, Kovair discusses the best practices to be adopted by the stakeholders while implementing an effective application integration solution within an organization.

Know Your Goals

Defining the goals of your integration

• The business drivers for integrating applications
• The information available at management’s end
• The existing applications and services under management
• The core business processes and their dependencies
• The integration scenarios, such as Application-to-Application (A2A), Business-to-Business (B2B), and Cloud-based applications (Software-as-a-Service – SaaS)

Consider the Right Integration Approach

Selecting the right integration technology is the next important step once you have set your goals. Choose an Integration Platform instead of multiple ad hoc point-to-point solutions that:

• Gives you a one-stop-solution for all your integration needs
• Provides fast and simple deployment options
• Requires limited IT Support
• Offers improved adaptability and agility
• Supports Functional Reusability
• Provides end-to-end traceability across toolsets and artifacts
• Has an independent Change Management system
• Delivers interoperability in a loosely coupled framework
• Helps to orchestrate rather than just integrate tools of different functions and technology
• Generates configurable reports for visual monitoring of integration success and failure
• Supports both linking and syncing mechanisms along with data migration needs
• Meets the needs of enterprise-class security
• Supports multiple versions of the same tool or application
• Can easily accommodate the future replacement of any application or addition of new applications to your application ecosystem in a plug-and-play mode

Be Aware of Technical Considerations

Before driving an application integration project, the project stakeholders need to consider and analyze the specific technical requirements for:

• Semantic and Metadata Management
• Validation of data for correct structure and format
• Standard and Advanced Transformations
• Information Consumption, Processing and Delivery
• Intelligent Routing
• Connectivity and Adapter Management
• Governance across all applications

Know the Functional Requirements

Project stakeholders need to identify:

• Applications or tools to be integrated
• Information/data required to be synchronized across tools
• Mapping of metadata between applications or tools
  • Avoid meaningless data replication if it does not address any specific business need
• Relationships between artifacts of different tools to be synchronized
• Integration rules to follow
  • Identify which tools and items need bi-directional data integration and which need one-way integration
  • Identify the conditions for which data would flow from one tool to another
• Data latency requirements
  • For some tool, it may be sufficient to synchronize the data on a daily basis and for some other tool, it may be required to synchronize data in every minute

Know the Non Functional Requirements

The non-functional requirements to be considered are:

• Performance
  • Determine the data volume that would be transported on a regular basis – Define performance metrics upfront
  • Determine the permitted latency limits
  • Determine the growth of data over the years
  • Plan hardware configuration to support probable data volume up to at least two years
• Scalability
  • Understand the scalability options
  • Plan for load balanced servers based the load of on your data flow
• Security
  • Understand and document security requirements
  • Ensure compliance with organizational data security policies
  • Encrypted storage and transport of security credentials
• Reliability
  • Understand and document reliability measures needed
  • Check whether the integration framework will provide the required reliability measures
• Availability – Failover
  • Understand the availability and failover options
  • Plan for configuring these options based on your availability needs
• Migration
  • Define your data migration needs
  • Check with the vendor – how to implement data migration
• Monitoring
  • Failures and faults at the services/ adapters level
  • Failures and errors at the data synchronization level
  • Notifications/Reporting for failures/ errors
  • Integration Health Dashboard

Focus on User Management

User Management is done differently in different applications or tools. Some tools support LDAP (Light-weight Directory Access Protocol) based user management while others have their own user management functionalities. Application integration requires user synchronization between different tools. An Integration Platform should provide the following options for it:

• LDAP/ Active Directory based User Management support for all applications
• Automated User Mapping Policies between applications
• Manual User Mapping between applications
• Any central User Management system shared by all applications

Work on Project/Template Management Setup

Organizations deal with hundreds of projects. Reusing the configuration setup done for integrating several applications across projects is the key to success of an Integration Platform deployment. An Integration Platform should support the following best practices to facilitate an integration setup:

• Automation in Integration Setup for large number of projects
• Integration Templates for different project types
  • Set of applications to be integrated
  • Metadata mapping between objects from different applications
  • Set of Integration Flows or Rules
• New projects inherited from the above templates based on the project type
• Templates administered by Process/ Tools Group
• Project specific Integration Setups are managed by Project Managers

Select Integration Adapters/ Connectors

Stakeholders need to identify the integration use cases upfront and ensure that the adapters/ connectors can support easy and effective implementation of those use cases.

• Identify the tools, 3rd party and homegrown, for which Integration Adapters would be needed
• For standard applications, discuss and define:

Tool	Event	Action
IBM RequisitePro – Requirements Management Tool	A Requirement is approved for implementation in a particular release.
HP Quality Center – Test Management Tool		RequisitePro Requirement is replicated in Quality Center as a Test Requirement.
HP Quality Center	Test Cases created by Tester in Quality Center to test the functionality provided by the above Requirement. Test Cases are executed and Test Results are recorded in Quality Center.
IBM RequisitePro		Test Results for the Requirement are replicated in RequisitePro.

Learn the Deployment Stages

Follow the best practices for deploying an integration platform.

• Staging environment
  • Set up Development environment
  • Set up Test environment
• Testing
  • Configure Test Cases to verify your Integration Use Cases
  • Execute Tests on Development and Test servers
  • Perform load testing
  • Perform security testing
  • Perform reliability testing – check the scenario when tools are down or offline
  • Perform availability and failover testing
• Production
  • After successful testing, deploy the integration platform and adapters on Production servers
  • Ensure failure/exception alerts are sent to the right people
  • Set up regular backup of the relevant integration components

How Kovair Omnibus Integration Platform Helps

Kovair Omnibus is the leading Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) integration technology available for Application Development and IT tools. With standardized SOA based tool-specific Omnibus adapters, one can create his or her own tools ecosystem. These tools can be from any vendor, or any legacy data, or any custom homegrown application development and IT tools. Kovair’s Omnibus integration technology has major advantages that are not typically found in the vendor-specific point tools or even a suite of tools.

Conclusion

Organizations continually face challenges in finding out ways to leverage more ROI out of their existing infrastructure and applications. Having an effective Application Integration strategy is critical to taking on this daunting challenge. Choosing the right integration technology and following the best practices to establish an agile, reliable and scalable platform that is equipped to extend the life of your existing proven applications can meet your future application development demands.