Listen to this articleDear Kovair Customers and Friends,
The fall season is upon us and the year is moving forward rapidly with about 2.5 months left to bring transactions to a close for fiscal 2009. Please let us know if we can help you in that process!
Things are progressing well at Kovair. Here are a few highlights for the month:
1. Kovair was included in the September 16, 2009 report by Gartner on “Who’s Who in Application Platforms for Cloud Computing: the Enterprise Generalists.” This endorsement by Gartner reaffirms our position that Kovair is a very flexible application development platform that can be configured for any application with codeless mouse clicks approach on the Cloud. This is above and beyond what we do for both Application Lifecycle Management and ITSM solutions! We offer this cloud platform as a SaaS or On-Premise delivery model for those of you who wish to create your own applications with a “mash-up” like concept although there are distinctions to consider between the two. If you are interested in pursuing this, please visit www.kovair.com and look under Kovair Enterprise Service Bus Solutions and contact sales@kovair.com.
2. We have created two publications during the month – the first one is about the Kovair Omnibus Integrations titled “The Value Proposition of Kovair for Tools Integrations” and the second is “Kovair ITSM Use Case Examples.” The first paper discusses the benefits derived from the Kovair Omnibus Integrations of best of breed tools from other vendors and the second contains case examples from two Kovair customers that have deployed Kovair for IT Service Management. Download these publications today by visiting www.kovair.com and click on the “downloads” tab to access them.
3. We just completed Kovair integrations with the Eclipse Platform for a major IT Services Company. It is now available to any customer who wishes to use the Eclipse development environment for JAVA along with all the native ALM capabilities of Kovair as well as other tools derived through Kovair’s integrations with them. Read a brief article by Kovair’s VP of Engineering about the Eclipse integration and its benefits in this newsletter. Please sign up also for our ITSM Webinar for which the details are provided below.
With best wishes for your business,
Bipin Shah
CEO & Chairman
Kovair Software
www.kovair.com
Eclipse Plug-In for the Kovair Omnibus
By: Atanu Majumdar, Kovair VP of Engineering
The Eclipse Plug-in for the Kovair Omnibus allows Eclipse developers to access Kovair functionality directly from within their familiar IDE environment. Other ALM tools such as Quality Center for Test Management, Requisite Pro for Requirements Management and in-house tools that are integrated to Kovair through the Omnibus platform are also accessible for direct user operation from Eclipse through this plug-in. This plug-in is helpful to any organization in providing an enhanced platform for developers where its established processes, tools and practices are seamlessly integrated.
The Eclipse Plug-in for the Kovair Omnibus is SOA-based. Kovair built an open Omnibus Plug-in architecture that communicates to individual tools integrated to the Omnibus through Adapters. The Eclipse Plug-in is based on this architecture. Kovair is now building a Visual Studio Team System Plug-in based on the same architecture. Kovair has plans to do other plug-ins such as Rational Application Developer, Outlook, etc. following the same architecture. Any organization can create plug-ins for their home-grown tools using this open service API. “Our goal is to provide the ALM world with an efficient, flexible and easily maintainable integrated ALM platform solution based on open standards in order to improve the bottom-line productivity of broad based stakeholders allowing them to use their own preferred tools. This open plug-in architecture is a new addition in this continued endeavor,” according to Kovair CEO Bipin Shah.
Any organization can benefit from its integration of processes, tools and practices using the Eclipse Plug-in for Kovair Omnibus in the following way.
Increased Productivity
Developers and testers get access to Requirements, Design items, Test Cases and Defects directly from within their IDE. These artifact items may come from different ALM tools but developers and testers can operate on all these items from their native environment without requiring switching between different tools. They can now perform their project management activities within Eclipse. This increases productivity to a great extent and helps teams work efficiently within their familiar IDE environment. It also reduces considerable training time that is otherwise required to learn different tool usages.
Efficient and Timely Data Capture
Often, developers and testers find it difficult to submit their work results in a timely manner when they need to switch between tools and they might put this task off for a later time or even forget. With this plug-in they can complete their work in a code development environment with unit testing using JUnit, develop a software build using ANT, and report the results immediately! This helps in capturing work output much more efficiently.
Improved Process Participation
Generally, developers express fears about the introduction of process. There is an underlying perception that the process has too much overhead and it increases workload beyond their regular job duties. With this plug-in, they can watch their process tasks easily from the IDE, work on the process without struggle, and readily mark the tasks as completed when finished. They become a part of the process without even realizing it! The Kovair process automation framework does the job from behind-the-scenes to produce the next tasks for the appropriate stakeholders. This removes the barrier for process participation and helps in accomplishing a better acceptance of enforcing process through automation.
Improved Quality
Developers and testers have ready real-time access to the Requirements and Test Cases from Eclipse IDE and become much more informed to improve the quality of their coding and testing. Review tasks created in other Project Management Tools will appear in this IDE environment. Project managers and team leaders can complete their review jobs within IDE and submit the results immediately. All of this results in better software quality.
Detailed Metrics
Developers, testers and managers will be able to easily capture lot more detail data like code analysis results, unit testing results, test coverage results and build results using this Eclipse plug-in. Project stakeholders would be able to view analysis and reporting on these detail data in Kovair or any other project management tool integrated through the Kovair Omnibus.
Enhanced Visibility
Developers and testers will be able to report the progress regularly on their coding, testing, bug fixing and review tasks. This will result in greater visibility for the project managers with the overall status as well as detail-level progress.
Kovair is currently deploying a setup at a large IT Services Company where the Eclipse Plug-in for Kovair Omnibus will be used by several thousand developers across hundreds of projects.
