Directory:Application Lifecycle Management

SCM tool is one of the most widely used and indispensable tools in a software development organization of any size. However, for a complete Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), SCM is just one of many such tools critical for success. Kovair Global Lifecycle offers a number of such critical built-in ALM applications including Requirements Management, Test Management, Change Management, Issues Management, and Release Management and their tools such as Requirements Management tools,Test Management tool, Issue Management tool. Integration of a SCM tool with Kovair Global Lifecycle therefore provides an unprecedented ecosystem for a development organization. Perforce is one of the leading SCM tools known for its performance and flexibility. This paper describes the details of the integration between Perforce and Kovair and the benefits the Perforce users and the whole development group get out of this integration. The users of other SCM tools can expect a similar set of benefits from the integration of the particular SCM tool with Kovair Global Lifecycle. Kovair has created the Perforce adapter using its industry leading Omnibus Integration Bus technology. Omnibus ensures a vendor neutral ALM Platform. Significant features of Kovair Omnibus Technology are – Bus Architecture, Web Service standards (using SOAP protocol), and tool–specific API. So, any third party tool can be integrated with Kovair Global Lifecycle, by creating an adapter.The integration has been achieved by creating an Omnibus Adapter – specific to Perforce SCM. The adapter maintains two way communications of data between Kovair Global Lifecycle and Perforce SCM.

Kovair Integration with Perforce

The adapter is a lightweight interface expositing the internal data schema of Perforce. There is no hard coded business logic in the adapter. This makes the same adapter highly adaptable to various business needs for different organizations. The business rules are defined using the Kovair Service Flow user interface and does not need any coding. The beauty of separating out the data layer (adapter) and the business rule layer (Service Flow) is that the end users e.g. business analysts or the development managers can define and redefine business rules without changing the adapter. The business rules for the transmission of data across the tools are defined by the Service Flow. It is the conditional logic of how tools will behave on real-time events. Service Flows are fully customizable,according to business needs, and it does not require writing a single line of code. As and when an event matches with a Service Flow trigger, data gets replicated from Kovair to Perforce or vice versa. Kovair’s Omnibus Integration bus technology can be used with synchronization or two-way replication between Kovair and Perforce SCM. For example, by synchronization the Change lists in Perforce can be synchronized with the Change lists in Kovair - which means a Change list added or edited in Kovair is replicate in Perforce SCM and vice versa. However, for all items, synchronization is not desirable, especially if the data content is too big in size. Hence, for the source files in Perforce SCM, a different strategy is used. Only the information about the files and Not the file content is replicated in Kovair. When the content is needed Omnibus requests Perforce to get the actual content of the particular file on-demand. This method allows the actual data to remain in Perforce SCM’s repository and fetched only when needed. This method is called Federation.

Read more about Software Configuration Management (SCM) at Wikkipedia. Also read more about IT Service Management here.