Extending global tool integration environment towards lifecycle management

Abstract

Development and verification of complex systems requires close collaboration between different disciplines and specialists operating in a global development environment with various tools and product data storage. Fluent integration of the tools and databases facilitate a productive development environment by enabling the user to easily launch tools and transfer information between the disconnected databases and tools. The concept of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) was established to indicate the coordination of activities and the management of artefacts during the software product's lifecycle. This paper presents the analysis of an open source global tool integration environment called ToolChain, and proposes improvement ideas for it towards application lifecycle management. The demonstration of ToolChain and the collection of improvement proposals were carried out in the telecommunication industry. The analysis was made using the ALM framework and Global Software Development (GSD) patterns developed in previous studies in the automation industry. © Springer-Verlag 2009.