In today's business environment, developers must increasingly use their skills across their organization through the creation of collaborative development environments. Team Integrator for Eclipse-Based Tools enables collaboration between developers in different roles using different tools. The collaboration mechanism is configurable and can be integrated with existing processes, tools, and rules. This package provides team integration for business process management (BPM), an exemplar implementation of the package, and projects built using WebSphere® Business Modeler and WebSphere Integration Developer.

In this package, a series of Eclipse plug-ins were developed and installed into WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Integration Developer in order to enable the interactions and intellectual exchanges that occur during a BPM project. In addition, this proof-of-concept package provides utilities that increase the productivity and functionality of both the business modeler and the integration developer.

The various interactions during the project include negotiation, hand-over of work, and iterative project refinement based on feedback and learning. These interactions are captured in a set of collaboration templates in order to provide different collaboration types. The business modeler and integration developer are then able to select the type of collaboration they wish to perform and have this template guide their interactions while keeping them "in sync" and maintaining an auditable history of the collaborative process.

To improve the efficiency of the team during the development of BPM solutions, additional tools have been provided: For WebSphere Business Modeler, a function is provided that generates meaningful change reports based on updates made to the business model and that enables the exchange of this report with the integration developer. For WebSphere Integration Developer, a function is provided that enables the synchronization of changes: The function enables the recording of updates made to the process model and the reapplication of these updates when a new version of the project is received from the business modeler.

This package includes plug-ins for WebSphere Business Modeler, plug-ins for WebSphere Integration Developer, a user guide, and a recorded demonstration.

How does it work?

This exemplar of Team Integrator for Eclipse-Based Tools adds three new capabilities to the WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Integration Developer platforms:

• Change report generation for WebSphere Business Modeler projects: Human-readable synopses of project modifications are constructed by collecting data from the Eclipse Modeling Framework's event listener mechanism and passing it through a multi-stage refinement process.
• Collaborative features that allow direct communication between WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Integration Developer: Changes in one tool are reflected in the other, either by user interface (UI) changes or modifications to the task list mechanism. This feature uses a third-party location (either ClearCase or a shared directory). These collaborative features provide negotiation of work proposal documents, hand-over of artifacts, and a feedback mechanism.
• A synchronization tool for WebSphere Integration Developer: A sophisticated patch mechanism is used to record changes made to one model and replay them on another version. This non-format-specific, non-product-specific tool increases productivity in cases in which multiple people exchange and update the same artifact in parallel. This tool allows developers to record changes they have made to the artifact so that, as they receive updated versions from collaborating roles, they need not manually update the new versions.

The Scenario Analysis Lab (SAL) team is a development organization that is part of the SWG Strategy and Technology division. They deliver add-on packages focused on integration and collaboration between SWG products. They also create tools and define practices that assist other SWG development teams in quickly designing, developing, and building such integration add-ons. This package was developed in the Hursley Laboratories; the core team included Larry Yusuf, Chris Bygrave, Simon Burns, and Roshan Nichani. The team can be reached through e-mail.