DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • DevOps Chats
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Communities
    • AWS Community Hub
    • CloudBees
    • IT as Code
    • Rocket on DevOps.com
    • Traceable on DevOps.com
    • Quali on DevOps.com
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Container Journal
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Digital Anarchist
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Testing
  • DevSecOps
  • DevOps Onramp
  • Practices
  • ROELBOB
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps

Home » Blogs » Avoiding Application Integration Fails

Avoiding Application Integration Fails

By: contributor on July 26, 2017 Leave a Comment

Trying to integrate applications on your own can eat your project alive. A seemingly simple project may look harmless when you start, but in the end do-it-yourself software delivery tool integrations can devour your entire software process.

Recent Posts By contributor
  • How to Ensure DevOps Success in a Distributed Network Environment
  • Dissecting the Role of QA Engineers and Developers in Functional Testing
  • DevOps Primer: Using Vagrant with AWS
More from contributor
Related Posts
  • Avoiding Application Integration Fails
  • What Is User Acceptance Testing and Why Is it so Important?
  • Continuous Integration vs. Delivery vs. Deployment: What’s the Difference?
    Related Categories
  • Blogs
  • DevOps Practice
  • DevOps Toolbox
    Related Topics
  • applications
  • developers
  • development
  • integration
  • testing
  • testing tools
  • workflows
Show more
Show less

The problem may be that building simple integrations appears easy. How hard can an integration be? But let’s look at what typically happens with integrations down the road using the example of one developer’s story.

A developer needs to send defects from Zendesk to JIRA, so he builds a one-way integration based on a workflow action (just a trigger). Soon enough, he realizes he is now managing two tools, and keeping them updated has become a big issue—a very manual process and a huge time-sink. So he designs something to support two-way updates. But that’s just the beginning; each tool changes every few months and an integration that seemed so simple on the surface becomes very complicated.

Then our developer tries to modify a simple JIRA workflow. Again, it seems straightforward, but it’s not, because the tools involved are constantly changing. There are complexities with workflows, and organizations undertake endpoint system upgrades. As a result, one change to the tool breaks everything he’s done. On top of this, it’s difficult now for him to know the hierarchy or how one item relates to another.

He starts to consider some of the challenges he’s facing. He needs to consider how the description is written in each tool. They are all different, so how does he make sure he conveys the information correctly every time? And each “simple” integration seems to create more pain points, creating auditability and traceability problems. Meanwhile, he has to manage other tools that are continually added to the mix.

He’s taken a look at both API and custom-tool approaches. He’s found that API integrations are brittle or they become too popular and then have to be maintained for an entire organization. But the alternative—custom tools—typically fall apart quickly.

And what happens when our developer decides to leave the company? There’s no one left who knows how to maintain the integrations he created. Meanwhile, new tool replacements mean someone has to build new integrations—and the puzzle becomes even more complicated.

This short scenario illustrates the unexpected challenges developers face in creating and maintaining integrations. The cost of building and maintaining tool integrations in an always-evolving landscape is deceptively high. And when an integration fails and the organization suffers critical downtime, costs (and tempers) skyrocket.

Many of the common pitfalls are readily evident, such as rich text problems, but the following three areas may be the most challenging to developers addressing integration issues and can’t be easily avoided:

  • Endpoint system upgrades and schema changes
  • Workflow rules and differences
  • Relationships

Endpoint system upgrades and schema changes: Much of the time, a different team from the one that developed an integration will perform the upgrade. Perhaps a new field was added. Regardless, simple changes to APIs can blow up an integration. API responses may change formats or the expected values for a field may change. When the team upgrades the system the URL may change, so avoiding duplicates is tough. So, too, is ensuring that the change is seamless. Changing some of the underlying features could result in unexpected behavior (and it will be hard to detect where the problem actually is). It may be that JIRA made API changes that caused custom select fields and comments to fail when using the “old way”; however, other features may continue to work as expected, making this failure silent.

Workflow rules and differences: Workflows are the complexities between systems. It is hard enough to reconcile teams, let alone the tools they use. Tools may require you to enter required fields, and this can constantly change. And workflows may not match up at all. How can you handle these differences without bouncing field values and allowing complex mappings to reconcile these? What happens when a system has a special action to change a status and fields are required at the same time, but the other system is open and doesn’t reflect this?

Because of these issues, it is critical to get the teams being integrated (e.g. testing and development) to discuss workflows and where the two teams align. These teams need to understand where workflows overlap so they can undertake proper integrations.

Relationships: These are not always apparent. As you grow and want traceability, you need to have synchronized relationships. How does this requirement trace to a test? How will you manage those relationships? The tools don’t match the way they manage relationships. Some allow one value, others multiple. Some allow relationships across projects and types, others are more restrictive. In addition to the rules of the system, how do you know what items to link once you have synchronized the artifacts? What happens if only one side of the link is synchronized or the items are not synchronized in the order that you expected?

Getting this all right requires intelligent systems that can look at one system and translate properly to another

Avoiding Integration Pitfalls

The first obvious step in avoiding pitfalls is to identify what they will be and when they’ll pop up. To do this, focus not just on the current problem, but also on the future. Consider the bigger picture, understanding that systems constantly change and teams work differently so there will be additional layers of complexity in any integration project down the road.

As such, my best advice is for development organizations to focus on the software their organizations are counting on them to deliver, not creating and managing tools to build that software. Put internal resources to work in IT areas where you can create competitive advantage for your company. And consider using third parties to address issues such as integrations.

About the Author / Shawn Minto

Shawn Minto is the senior director of Technical Services and Support at Tasktop and one of the original team members working with CEO and co-founder, Mik Kersten, on Mylyn prior to Tasktop’s founding.  Shawn began his career at Tasktop as a software engineer, working on all aspects of the product and directly with our customers to support their needs. Currently he works with customers to understand their tool environments and offers suggestions on how to best leverage Tasktop through deployments and support. In his free time, he enjoys being outside, cooking, and renovation projects. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Filed Under: Blogs, DevOps Practice, DevOps Toolbox Tagged With: applications, developers, development, integration, testing, testing tools, workflows

Sponsored Content
Featured eBook
The State of Open Source Vulnerabilities 2020

The State of Open Source Vulnerabilities 2020

Open source components have become an integral part of today’s software applications — it’s impossible to keep up with the hectic pace of release cycles without them. As open source usage continues to grow, so does the number of eyes focused on open source security research, resulting in a record-breaking ... Read More
« 8 Advantages of Using MySQL
From ‘Water-Scrum-Fall’ to DevSecOps »

TechStrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

10 steps to continuous performance testing in DevOps
Thursday, August 11, 2022 - 3:00 pm EDT
Bring Your Mission-Critical Data to Your Cloud Apps and Analytics
Tuesday, August 16, 2022 - 11:00 am EDT
Mistakes You Are Probably Making in Kubernetes
Tuesday, August 16, 2022 - 1:00 pm EDT

Latest from DevOps.com

CloudNativeDay: WASM to Drive Next IT Epoch
August 10, 2022 | Mike Vizard
MLOps Vs. DevOps: What’s the Difference?
August 10, 2022 | Gilad David Maayan
GitHub Brings 2FA to JavaScript Package Manager
August 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard
CREST Defines Quality Verification Standard for AppSec Testing
August 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard
IBM Unveils Simulation Tool for Attacking SCM Platforms
August 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard

Get The Top Stories of the Week

  • View DevOps.com Privacy Policy
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Download Free eBook

DevOps: Mastering the Human Element
DevOps: Mastering the Human Element

Most Read on DevOps.com

Recession! DevOps Hiring Freeze | Data Centers Suck (Power) ...
August 4, 2022 | Richi Jennings
Orgs Struggle to Get App Modernization Right
August 4, 2022 | Mike Vizard
GitHub Adds Tools to Simplify Management of Software Develop...
August 4, 2022 | Mike Vizard
The Everything-As-Code Revolution and the OWASP Top 10
August 4, 2022 | Aakash Shah
Putting the Security Into DevSecOps
August 5, 2022 | Ross Moore

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2022 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.