An approach to automate the adaptor software generation for tool integration in Application/ Product Lifecycle Management tool chains.

Abstract: An emerging problem in organisations is that there exist a large number of tools storing data that communicate with each other too often, throughout the process of an application or product development. However, no means of communication without the intervention of a central entity (usually a server) or storing the schema at a central repository exist. Accessing data among tools and linking them is tough and resource intensive. As part of the thesis, we develop a software (also referred to as ‘adaptor’ in the thesis), which, when implemented in the lifecycle management systems, integrates data seamlessly. This will eliminate the need of storing database schemas at a central repository and make the process of accessing data within tools less resource intensive. The adaptor acts as a wrapper to the tools and allows them to directly communicate with each other and exchange data. When using the developed adaptor for communicating data between various tools, the data in relational databases is first converted into RDF format and is then sent or received. Hence, RDF forms the crucial underlying concept on which the software will be based. The Resource description framework (RDF) provides the functionality of data integration irrespective of underlying schemas by treating data as resource and representing it as URIs. The model of RDF is a data model that is used for exchange and communication of data on the Internet and can be used in solving other real world problems like tool integration and automation of communication in relational databases. However, developing this adaptor for every tool requires understanding the individual schemas and structure of each of the tools’ database. This again requires a lot of effort for the developer of the adaptor. So, the main aim of the thesis will be to automate the development of such adaptors. With this automation, the need for anyone to manually assess the database and then develop the adaptor specific to the database is eliminated. Such adaptors and concepts can be used to implement similar solutions in other organisations faced with similar problems. In the end, the output of the thesis is an approachwhich automates the process of generating these adaptors.