Is Your Integration Project Costing More Than It Should?

Over the years I’ve been directly involved in a great number of IT software development projects at Prolifics. And without exception these have all involved integration of a number of software components – whether it is integrating back-end systems such as SAP, plugging in external services from business partners, or the more relatively straightforward integration of new business systems or processes to in-house business services.

And something I’ve seen all of these projects having to deal with is the fact that software integration introduces some very real dependencies in development and test plans and environments – all of which require a fair amount of attention and a non-trivial amount of coordination and resources which could impact the time and budget estimates.

But what if there was a way to reduce the cost and planning impact of these dependencies?

Monica Luke and I tackle this topic in a new IBM whitepaper that discusses the usage of business service virtualization and testing techniques and tools to remove bottlenecks and reduce costs in building today’s modern, interconnected applications.

Many of our IBM customers will be interested in the discussion on example service architecture as well as mobile and portal domains. We briefly contextualize the value for customers using products such as WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus, IBM Integration Bus (previously WebSphere Message Broker) and MQ, WebSphere DataPower, IBM Business Process Manager, WebSphere Portal Server and IBM Worklight.

Read our whitepaper here:

Use Service Virtualization to Remove Testing Bottlenecks






How do I get started?
This is a great time to highlight Prolifics' very own IV&V (Independent Verification and Validation) practice. IV&V is an important aspect of our global delivery model, providing customers with end-to-end testing solutions that help to improve productivity and quality while reducing overall cost of all software development activities.

Our team has extensive experience in testing large, interconnected, critical business applications, and is ready to help you reinvent the way you approach your testing – backed by a service framework and testing accelerators that have been field tested and refined for over a decade.

Interested in taking a deeper dive? Connect with me!
Twitter - @greg_hodgkinson
Email - ghodgkinson@prolifics.com
LinkedIn - Greg Hodgkinson

To learn more about Prolifics, visit www.prolifics.com.

Gregory Hodgkinson is the Lifecycle Tools and Methodology Practice Director at Prolifics and an IBM Champion for Rational. Previous to that he was a Founder, Director, and the SOA Lead at 7irene, a visionary software solutions company in the United Kingdom. He has 16 years of experience in software architecture , initially specializing in the field of component-based development (CBD), then moving seamlessly into service-oriented architecture (SOA). His extended area of expertise is the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), and he assists Prolifics and IBM customers in adopting agile development processes and SOA methods. He is still very much a practitioner, and has been responsible for service architectures for a number of FTSE 100 companies. He presents on agile SOA process and methods at both IBM (Rational and WebSphere) and other events, has also co-authored a Redbook on SOA solutions, and contributes to DeveloperWorks.

Why SOA Governance?

Rajiv Ramachandran, Practice Director, Enterprise Integration / Solution Architect

One of the buzzwords that followed the introduction of SOA was “Governance”. It was interesting to see how every aspect of a new project initiative now began to be tagged with this word. All of a sudden there were - project governance, architectural governance, infrastructure governance and so on. The real essence of what “SOA Governance” was or why “Governance” was important in the context of an SOA was lost.

I am not denying that governance is essential in every aspect of business and IT. But what I want to focus on this blog is about SOA Governance.

Services have been there all along in the technology space but the advancement in SOA and its adoption started when both customers and vendors came together to define a standard way to describe a service. It then became possible to implement this description in a programming language of choice, be able to deploy the service across diverse platforms and still be able to communicate across platform and language boundaries. With this form an SOA revolution, reusing services became much easier and with reuse came a unique set of challenges.

My business depends on service that I

• Did not write,
• Do not own,
• Cannot control who will make changes to it and when,
• Don’t know whether it will provide me with the qualities of service that I desire
  

And if do get to own the service, now I had to pay to get the service built and others get it for free.

What a SOA Governance model does, is bring uniformity and maturity in defining Service Ownership, Service Lifecycle, Service Identification & Definition, Service Funding, Service Publication & Sharing, Service Level Agreement etc. and thus provide a solution to otherwise what would have become a Service Oriented Chaos.

So next time when you talk about SOA Governance think about some of the above defined areas that pertain to an SOA and how you can align – Process, People and Products to achieve an SOA Governance solution that ensures that your SOA provides real business value

In the next set of blog entries I will focus on how IBM WebSphere Registry & Repository product helps with SOA Governance.

Rajiv Ramachandran first joined Prolifics as a Consultant, and is currently the Practice Director for Enterprise Integration. He has 11 years experience in the IT field — 3 of those years at IBM working as a developer at its Object Technology Group and its Component Technology Competency Center in Bangalore. He was then an Architect implementing IBM WebSphere Solutions at Fireman’s Fund Insurance. Currently, he specializes in SOA and IBM’s SOA-related technologies and products. An author at the IBM developerWorks community, Rajiv has been a presenter at IMPACT and IBM's WebSphere Services Technical Conference.

Collaboration and Rational Tooling

Greg Hodgkinson, Methodology Pratice Leader

Running effective software development projects requires a certain level of tool support. For most organizations, the tools they have come from multiple vendors, and may also include a mix of both licensed and open-source tooling. As tools tend to be acquired to meet point problems, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture – how your team and tools fit together to deliver the business solutions needed. Integration (SOA) projects bring with them a new set of challenges which may require tooling of a type that you don’t currently have. Do you find yourself asking any of the following?

• How do I drive my team’s work in a way that allows me to track progress?
• How do I figure out what work and changes went into a build of the code created 6 months ago?
• How do I keep my distributed team aware of each other’s actions and progress?
• How do I ensure that my best practices are being adhered to?

These are questions we hear on a regular basis from our customers. Having tested and used various tooling, we have had great success with Rational Team Concert which is highly effective for team collaboration. Below are some slides I've put together which illustrate what I'm referring to...

Greg Hodgkinson is the Methodology Practice Leader at Prolifics. He has worked in software architecture since 1996, initially in the field of component-based development (CBD), then seamlessly on to service-oriented architecture (SOA). His extended area of expertise is the software development process, and he assists Prolifics and IBM customers in adopting agile software development processes and SOA methods. Complementing this is his expertise in software development environment architecture. He is still very much a practitioner, and has been responsible for service architectures for a number of FTSE 100 companies. He presents on agile SOA process and methods, has co-authored a Redbook on SOA solutions, and regularly writes for DeveloperWorks.