MKS Integrity 2007 pulls ahead of the competition with an integrated and comprehensive ALM solution.
There has never been a more exciting and rewarding time to be in the industry of systems application development. There also has never been a time when the risks were greater and the margin for error more critical – you must get it right or your failure will make headlines the next day. From process workflow, application requirements, source code management, through setting up a seamless deployment strategy – MKS leaves a lot of its competitors stunned by its full set of features and versatile comprehensive solution. If you are a development manager and you want to get your projects under control than you should take a serious look at MKS Integrity 2007. Read on if you want to learn more about this process and workflow platform that can set the stage for your large scale development effort to be a success in terms of meeting your deliverables on time and within budget.
How do we get the job done?
The application development community is looking to best of breed workflow solutions, requirements tracking, source code management tools, build and deploy frameworks to help manage the extraordinarily complex business of developing large scale (e.g., SOA) applications with large budgets and essentially no room for error or cost overruns. Senior management has learned that it is very possible – and indeed essential to have visibility into the projects that they choose to fund. Top technology talent is not easy to recruit and effectively manage with the competing business demands which are so common today in our fast paced business world. Eliminating ambiguity by specifying what needs to get done (and by when) can mean that your technology talent can focus on what they do best instead of spinning their wheels trying to figure how to get their release into QA on time. MKS Integrity 2007 has a comprehensive framework to address each of these compelling requirements that can make the difference between project success and project failure. Workflow is hot! There is an ongoing debate within the software development community as to which process improvement framework is best. Daily discussions occur in my world as to the value of the CMMi, Agile, ITIL, or COBIT. What is clear is that developers need to know what tasks must be completed and how/when their completion should be communicated to others. Senior management needs visibility into how the development effort is going – whether it be a major year long project or an emergency bug fix. Defining the process means that the tasks, roles and responsibilities and deadlines must be clearly defined and communicated. Project can fail and/or be seriously delayed just because the team does not have an efficient means of communicating the status of any dependency in the project. Robust workflow tools help the software development team to improve their efficiency and effectiveness while meeting their deadlines on time and within budget.
MKS workflow and visual modeling
The MKS workflow tool allows for the development of processes workflows that are highly customized and flexible. State transitions are managed with appropriate approvals and based upon roles and predetermined entitlements. There is even a facility for electronic (cryptographic) signatures which means that approvals and transitions are non-repudiated (a requirement in many regulatory environments). The process engineer has a visual modeling tool that allows for the workflow design process to be interactive – which essential in getting the team to agree upon a new and improved way of working (e.g., process improvement). The product comes with out of the box materials on how to use development methodologies (e.g., waterfall and iterative) and process improvement frameworks such as ITIL ().
Getting the requirements right.
MKS Integrity for requirements starts by helping the team clarify exactly what functionality needs to be developed and then integrates with the rest of MKS Integrity so that requirements are seamlessly connected to design, development, testing and deployment. This tool has rich features including a document view that supports context based authoring, rich text, tables, in line images and a robust structure that allows all of the stake holders to see the requirements framework in a logical and cognitively compelling manner. The requirements gathering process can be enforced to make certain that test cases reflect the application specifications. Requirements themselves are versioned allowing for control on who and when specifications are modified. This framework maximizes the best practices of requirements reuse and most importantly allows for requirements to follow through their own lifecycle and approvals. There is even a facility for conflict resolution including the ability for multiple users to give their input which is vetted through the toolset until consensus is reached and the final set of specifications determined.
Items in MKS Integrity
Items (formerly known as issues) are created in MKS Integrity. Change packages are then created for each item which acts as a container, grouping together specific members (e.g., files) that need to be changed to correct or satisfy the item. The change package is then assigned an ID and is in an “open” state. Members can be added to a change package through the SCM functions (e.g., checkout, checking, adding, etc.). The user checks in the members which are then moved along to the next state in the workflow.
Projects (and subprojects) can be created to organize a hierarchy of items (which can also be linked into relationships) that are then able to be worked on according to the workflow states that have been specified. MKS Integrity also integrates with MS Project in addition to its own project manage capabilities which includes time accounting and reporting.
MKS Source
Like many SCM tools MKS Source has a concept of a sandbox. Developers can checkout their code, update and then check their changes back in as needed. Resynchronizing (in other tools called rebasing) allows the developer to update his sandbox prior to checking his changes back in (which avoids breaking the build). Continuous Integrations tools such as CruiseControl recognize MKS Source and allow you to update sandboxes for the nightly (hourly) build. Change packages then allow you to create a logical unit of work leading into MKS Deploy – which provides a framework for organizing your application deployment. This product offering employs the best practices of staging your changes and preplanning backout procedures if necessary. Agents run on the target machine to perform actions on behalf of your MKS Integrity Server. The administrator or buildmeister installs and configures the MKS Agent with the appropriate security including user and group accounts that are authorized to make necessary updates. Getting your builds and deploys more reliable, including full traceability and the ability to seamlessly fallback (backout changes) from a particular deploy is core capability of any software development lifecycle.
Parallel Development
MKS Source includes support for parallel development including branch and merge. Variants in the code may be worked on in private sandboxes which can then be updated (resynched) with changes checked in by other developers. Checkouts may be reserved (locked) or unreserved (optimistic) as preferred by the development team. Developers should create Checkpoints in order to baseline the entire project either on the trunk or a development branch. Changes may be organized into Change Packages. Releases may be organized onto release branches which is a common practice with some CM tools. Project History allows the developer to see all of the versions for a particular variant of the code (this is critical when reverse engineering someone else’s code or just trying to recall what went into a particular release). Graphical history views allow the developer to examine a project’s development paths and branches. MKS Source has powerful SCM features that are considered best practices by most software development professionals.
Viewsets and customizing
Viewsets (actually collections of views) are powerful filters which allow your administrator to create customized filters which can (optionally) be forced upon a particular user. This is an essential administrative task which allows MKS Integrity to make sense from each user role (e.g., developer, release manager, tester, etc.). Users can also make modifications to their views which are then persisted and visible the next time that the user logs back into the system.
What’s new in MKS Integrity 2007
Many improvements have been made in this release of the product including support for large data sets through context based filtering on fields such as users, groups, projects, states and pick lists. I have seen other workflow/change management solutions initially be a huge success only to fall apart when the number of items posted made navigating the tools completely impossible. Users can now explicitly set queries, charts, reports and dashboards as being their favorite which allows for more logical navigation and organization of information. Projects, users and groups can also be set to be active or inactive to reduce the amount of information that is readily viewable – while maintaining history as needed.
Test Management Enhancements
The testing process can be extremely complex with testers needing to focus not only on identifying application regression but brand new functionality meeting the specifications as well as meeting the business needs at a practical level. MKS Integrity enhancements include tools to facilitate test case authoring, automated test execution framework as well as the overall test management workflow. Test coverage reporting enables the QA manager to identify test coverage gaps and to monitor the status and progress of the overall testing effort. Test cases and script themselves can be placed under version control which is obviously essential for any effective release management process.
A few things haven’t changed.
In my 2005 review of this product I noted that the underlying architecture of the product was J2EE built on an application server framework. MKS Integrity continues to boast support for IBM’s DB2, Oracle or Microsoft’s SQL Server. This product was built from the ground up with a consistent and extensible framework instead of purchasing a few different software packages and trying to integrate them together as many vendors do today. Please see my 2005 review for more on this solid framework.
What has changed is improved viewset management whereby MKS administrators can empower users with viewsets that allow for a more efficient user experience. Admins will also cheer their improved management of service packs including restoration of hot-fixes if necessary. Improved repository diagnostics allows admins to get an early warning in he event of hardware issues that might inadvertently result in repository corruption or perhaps simply performance bottlenecks. The better tools out there today manage the repository as a database with full surveillance and response procedures that allow the admin to keep the environment running smoothly and efficiently.
Additional supported platforms
MKS continues to support the latest platforms and databases including HP-UX 11i v3, RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.0 ES and the client is also supported on Windows Vista, Fedora Core 6, Suse Linus Enterprise Desktop 10 with databases including DB2 9 Base+ (AIX, Win32, Linux & Solaris) and DB2 400 V5R4. MKS Source Integrations include Borland JBuilder, Eclipse, WebSpere Dev Studio, Sybase PowerBuilder 10.5 and IBM’s Rational RAD, RSA and RMS software modeler.MKS Integrity has also supported integration with Mercury’s Quality Center for some time now including linking defects to changes in source code.
Deciding if MKS Integrity is right for you
MKS Integrity 2007 combines powerful project/portfolio management, requirements tracking, process and workflow design and management, source code management along with build (OpenMake), test and deploy. There are also modules to support Oracles/PeopleSoft and SAP and process improvement frameworks such as the very popular ITIL. This product provides a complete ALM framework that helps senior management have visibility into current project status and future project planning. The applications development team benefits from an extensive workflow methodology which provides clarity (and sanity) into the often exciting and turbulent software development effort. If you need to manage large scale software development efforts, and you want to get it right, then MKS Integrity 2007 should be on your short list of products to consider in helping you manage the entire software development effort.
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