Guest View: The Horizontal Tool Integration Imperative
By Susan Kunz
January 15, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 3)
While vertical tool integration might be good for vendors—stickiness equals revenue, equals lock-in, equals more revenue—consequences for customers aren’t all that positive. What are we solving for: vendor profitability or better software, faster and cheaper? Certainly vertical integration means at least some tools might work together, in some form or fashion, but no one has cornered the market on brain cells in today’s world, which is why a diverse portfolio of tools and applications will always be necessary.
Baby steps get you nowhere. It’s time to start thinking about how to deliver step-function improvements in quality—and this will require horizontal integration, or tools that talk to tools across vendor boundaries—i.e., time to play nice together. Expose those APIs and internal data formats. Add capabilities for data export and import.
I recently looked across our own development environment and was shocked to see what a significant contribution we are making to Intel and AMD’s top-line growth, not to mention global warming. We have a somewhat standard continuous integration environment that compiles code every five minutes if changes in our source code management system have been detected, integrates nightly, runs regression tests and a bunch of the other well-known tools.
The hitch is that most of these tools spend most of their time doing the same things: a compiler (parses source, builds an abstract syntax tree [AST]…), PMD for static analysis (parses source, builds an AST...), FindBugs for static analysis (parses byte code, builds an internal structure…), Dependency Finder for interdependency mapping (parses byte code, builds an internal structure…), Ounce Labs for source code security (parses source, produces internal representation…), SWaudit for continuous software quality audits (parses source, produces internal representation…), EMMA for line coverage (instruments bytecode…), Cobertura for branch coverage (instruments byte code…), Infrared for performance profiling (instruments byte code…)…well, you get the picture.
Streamlining the Process
So let’s think about how to streamline this. Parse source once, create “openly available and published abstract syntax tree” once, analyze many. Parse byte code, create “openly available and published internal structure” once, analyze many. Instrument for all data that can be collected at the same time via an “openly available and published” instrumentation framework, collect as much as possible in a single run, then repeat as appropriate (e.g., for performance profiling, footprint analysis, etc.).
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