1.5.2 Analysis of results

The most important quality feature desired by the stakeholders is extensibility, they want to keep their options open to easily implement support for new systems in the application.

As described earlier, the application has been designed to provide flexibility when adding a new system to retrieve data from. As can be read in the next chapter, the assumption is that tools will more frequently change than tool types. Here we will describe what needs to be done when adding support for a new tool to the application.

First of all, a new data gatherer needs to be written which knows how to retrieve the necessary data from the system. This gatherer must gather the information and abstract it to the data type that has been chosen for the aggregate system type data. If the system type the new system belongs to is already present in the application, this is all that needs to be done.

When adding an entirely new system type, some more work is in order. Apart from the creation of a new gatherer, the logic that deals with the combined data and draws conclusions to it must be adapted. This means that an addition to the business logic layer is also necessary. Probably some rules need to be added to the business rules engine. Also, the extractor and transformer need to be adapted in order to deal with the processing of the new data types.

1.5.3 Assumptions

Some assumptions that we have made when working out this design is that there is a way to extract data from each critical system. This could be by using an API or reading data from a file processed by it, but there must be SOME way. An application that outputs no data to an accessible source is not useable for this type of problem.

Another assumption is the fact that though the stakeholders have stated that they’re always looking for new tools to do a better job, the TYPE of tools probably doesn’t change as often. For example, SVN used to be the industry standard for version control but now the industry is moving more towards decentralized versioning control systems. The implementation changes, but the general idea is still the same: it holds a record of code adaptations from one or multiple developers. This assumption has been tested with the stakeholders, and they agree.