Integration Environment

Definition

The integration environment is any development environment that is primarily used by the integration team to incrementally and iteratively integrate the software components of an application.

Objectives

The objectives of the integration environment are to provide the necessary infrastructure to enable the integration team to perform:

• The incremental iterative integration of the components of an application.
• Integration testing of the application.
• Regression unit testing to ensure that unit testing is current and complete (so that the software components are ready to integrate).
• Regression functional testing (a subset of test cases) to ensure that nothing major has broken that would prevent effective system testing.

Benefits

The typical benefits of an integration environment include:

• It improves the efficiency of integration and integration testing.
• A separate integration environment allows integration to proceed in parallel with development and system testing (which follows integration).

Contents

The typical contents of an integration environment are:

• Hardware Components:
  • Integration team workstations
  • Integration server (having the same operating system as the engineering environment)
  • Local area network
• Software Components:
  • Documentation Tools
  • Configuration Management Tools
  • Test Tools for:
    • Small Component Testing (regression testing)
    • Integration Testing
    • Functional Testing (partial regression testing)

Stakeholders

The typical stakeholders of the integration environment are:

• Producers:
  • Environments Team
• Evaluator:
  • Environments Inspection Team
• Approvers:
  • Technical Leader
  • Project Manager
  • Customer Representative
• Maintainers:
  • Environments Team
  • Integration Team
• Users:
  • Integration Team, which uses the integration environment to integrate the components of the application and perform integration testing on the application.

Phases

• Business Strategy: Not Applicable
• Business Optimization: Not Applicable
• Initiation: Optionally started in preparation of the construction phase.
• Construction: Completed and Maintained
• Delivery: Maintained
• Usage: Maintained
• Retirement: Archived

Preconditions

The integration environment can typically be started if the following preconditions hold:

• The environments team is adequately staffed and trained.
• The integration environment section of the project environments description document exists.

Inputs

The typical inputs to the integration environment include:

• Work Products:
  • Project Environments Description Document
• Stakeholders:
  • Integration Team, which uses the integration environment to perform integration and integration testing.
  • Process Team, which ensures that the integration environment supports the project integration and integration testing process.

Guidelines

• The integration environment should include the same source control software as the engineering environment.
• The integration environment must have access to and be accessible to the reuse, engineering, multimedia, test, and staging environments.

Conventions

The integration environment is typically constrained by the following conventions:

• Integration Environment Inspection Checklist

Examples

• Not applicable.