Integrating Tools for an Efficient Software Development Life Cycle
Organizations
in their attempt towards meeting the challenges of the competitive
business environment look towards technology and its advances to be
benefitted by it. Technological innovations help the globally bound
business organizations to be networked and be communicative in all
respects, be update with software applications for faster and better
business transactions.
However, the software development
aspects are taken care of by the experts in the IT industry.
Technically, software development is a complex process and goes
through various stages of development procedure which is termed
as software
development lifecycle (SDLC). The basic stages of software
development can be detailed as understanding the requirements which
includes need for software, client expectations and technical
feasibility. After analyzing the requirements and technical
feasibility, comes the initiation which starts with the design phase,
made up of system design and component design. While the system
design caters to the design of the software as a whole, the component
design plans for the individual components. This is followed by the
implementation, testing, documentation, project deployment and
maintenance phases.
However, today with technological
innovations gaining a center stage, a number of enterprises from the
IT sector have forayed into the business of providing SDLC solutions.
These solutions helps organizations to ease out the complexities of
business and IT and also help in achieving the organizational goals
and objectives. The stages of the software development cycle follow a
definite development methodology as per the organizational
requirements or the requirements of the project. Customization of the
software development lifecycle requires the service providers to
evaluate each requirement before formulating the development
strategy. SDLC follows either the traditional waterfall development
methodology or the iterative one or an agile methodology. The
software development lifecycle facilitates improving the requirements
management for software development, and the quality and efficiency
of the products delivered.
With the primary objective to
enhance the quality and efficiency of the software
delivered, SDLC solutions
provides adequate control and reporting formats. The software
development lifecycle solutions offered by the leaders in the
industry include a number of tools which need to be integrated. The
first one being the requirements
management software tools, followed by test management,
issue management, risk management, release management and IT project
management. Other functions such as configuration management can be
achieved through integration of third party tools with the help of
the integration bus adapters.
Though there are in-built tools
that facilitate integration from external locations, the ecosystem
requires point-to-point integrated multi-vendor tools. The word-class
multivendor tools include eclipse integration, subversion
integration, quality center integration and TFS integration tools.
Software development life cycle thus gains it strength from
uniformity in design, methods and operations.
Other Links
In : ALM