Systems integration projects in IT management field typically do not follow software engineering methodologies and tools commonly used by software developers. There are number of reasons for this. Integration work is often after thought, integrators (like myself) may write code (mostly scripts) but often not software developers by training. The tools are also lacking since the integration often involves proprietary components and programming languages provided by the vendors. Forget about IDEs, refactoring, unit testing frameworks, etc. Still there are tremendous benefits in using whatever tools available.
We've been working on gathering sort of "best practices" with the objective to make them standard operating practices for ourselves. Looking into some of the techniques/tools/methodologies and learning from our software developers, some of our customers, and web 2.0 world (collaboration), we've identified a core set of practices that we think is not too ambitious: collaboration, version control tools, and automated acceptance tests
Collaboration: read more »
