System Integration Development and Testing Process

Abstract

Organizations' decision making and business operations are more efficient when all of the data that is available for the organization can be used for them. System integrations are used to transfer the data between all of the relevant systems as a solution to this. Even though system integrations have a lot in common with other types of software development, they have differences and unique characteristics. An integration platform that consists of numerous integrations is developed to the City of Espoo and issues were discovered during the development and testing activities of them. This thesis was done to find solutions for those found problems and to make the processes smoother and more cost effective. Espoo has multiple integration platforms, the one studied in this thesis is only one of them. In this thesis the system integration specific challenges are looked into and reflected to other types of software development using literature concerning the subjects. After that a case study was done in the integration platform project and as a result process models of current development and testing processes were done. Using literature, interviews and personal experience improvement ideas were made and applied to form an improvement development process model for the project as it was discovered that the testing process itself had no significant flaws as the problems were inherited from the development process before it. The results can be applied to all kinds of system integration projects, as the problems seem to be universal and found in pretty much every integration project.