Typically, the development of a business integration system involves the following stages:
This stage begins the implementation process by identifying the business goals for the project, the system requirements, and the overall scope of the development effort.
The process of requirements elicitation is very specific to different organizations. This section presents some of the possible questions you will need to ask, but you should follow whatever method is appropriate for your organization.
Discovery starts at a high level and proceeds to lower levels of detail. It should begin with the following high-level questions:
The answer to this question is important, because it establishes the functional requirements for interfaces during the testing stages. If testing later reveals that the business problem has not been solved then the interfaces were not designed or developed properly.
Ask the following questions and others that might be relevant:
Determine the characteristics of the technology environment. Examine each of the following:
To identify the interfaces needed for the implementation and the components that will be used, you must research information in lower levels of detail, identifying and describing the specific business processes that you intend to implement, the business logic and data transformations that are required, and details of the applications and databases that will interact. Your research may include the following information-gathering tasks:
Before you begin development activities, you should first install and prepare your environment. This includes these tasks:
Evaluation and design are dependent upon the detailed information gathered during discovery.
When you have determined the detailed requirements of an interface and the integration components that it comprises, you are ready to evaluate available, existing integration components to see if any will meet your needs. You may find that for some requirements, components already exist and can be used as is, that for other requirements existing components need to be extended (revised according to your needs), and that for other requirements you will need to create new (custom) integration components.
To begin your evaluation, consult the documentation to learn about the characteristics of any pre-built components that may be available to you. Determine whether you can make use of pre-built technology adapters supplied with IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server Express and Express Plus. If you are using Express Plus, determine whether pre-built adapters available through the Adapter Capacity Pack, and collaborations and business objects available through the Collaboration Capacity Pack, will be useful in your interface. The capacity packs are separately available as optional additions to IBM WebSphere Business Integration Server Express Plus.
Evaluate each component both individually and in terms of how it relates to other components in the overall interface. You cannot complete the design of one component until you have also begun the design of the components with which it interacts in the interface.
For detailed information about designing components, see the following guides:
In this stage you develop integration components according to the specifications that were derived in the Design stage.
To develop the interface, you modify (if necessary) existing components that are available, such as collaboration templates and business objects, and create new components that are environment-specific (such as maps).
You define an integration component library to store your component definitions and a user project to represent your interface. You then create and store the integration components for your interface in the library and add shortcuts for them to the user project as you do so. These tasks are described in more detail in Working with integration component libraries and Working with user projects.
The development and configuration stage is iterative and you may have to re-develop components and modify configurations as you progress.
It is recommended that you unit test components as you develop them to ensure that they satisfy their roles in the interface as you have designed it. After you have developed and unit-tested all of the components in the interface, you perform string tests to validate that the interface as a whole works as designed.
Development and configuration is typically performed in a prescribed sequence of steps, as described in Developing business process interfaces.
While you are developing the integration components, they only exist in your local file system. When the interface is complete, you deploy it as a user project to an InterChange Server Express instance, where the component definitions are stored in the repository.
For more information on deploying user projects, see Exporting components to a package using System Manager.
For detailed information about developing components, see the following guides:
After you have deployed an interface to your local InterChange Server Express instance, you should test the interface to verify that it meets your requirements. For more information on testing, see Using Test Connector and Using Integrated Test Environment.
In a typical implementation, two instances of InterChange Server Express are available to you. You use one instance for developing the interface, and another as the production server that will handle the live data in your completed business integration system. You can use either of these instances for testing, but the typical approach will be to test on your development instance, and then migrate the successfully tested business integration system to the production instance.
During this stage, you perform functional, performance, and regression testing as required:
You perform functional testing to ensure that the interfaces in the business integration system satisfy the business process automation and integration goals of the project.
You perform performance testing to ensure that the throughput, response time, and latency are within expectations.
Depending on your specific circumstances, you may decide to migrate the business integration system into a different environment (other than your original production environment) for performance testing.
If you find that performance is not satisfactory, then some components might need modification or re-configuration.
If you modify any components as a result of the functional or performance testing (for instance, you modify a collaboration template that did not satisfy the business requirement), then you must perform regression testing to ensure that the changes made did not cause the component to violate requirements in some new way.
Overall, in completing the validation stage, you typically need to perform the following tasks:
For more information about testing components and interfaces, see the following:
The objective of the deployment stage is to migrate the business integration system into the production environment and start the production InterChange Server Express instance.
After you have validated that the business integration system satisfies the functional and performance requirements, you migrate the collection of interfaces into a production environment.