Tools Selection in an Agile Ecosystem

Standard Web Services based API: Ability to programmatically manipulate all aspects of information stored in the tool is key to integration. Hence the tool must have APIs which allows an integration platform to read and manipulate content in the tool. At the same time, the access to API should be controlled and only provided to API calls with valid, authenticated logins. It is important to check whether the API can integrate with leading identity and access management vendors or supports open standards for identification and authentication.

Access to Metadata: The API provided by the tool should support ability to access all aspects of metadata like projects, artifact types, fields, and relationships. It should be feasible to dynamically discover user customizations and configurations.

Change tracking capabilities: Often it is important to have full history of an artifacts journey through its lifecycle be visible in all the tools. For example, for a defect synced across multiple tools, it may be critical to have visibility into transition activities, instead of just the current state, in every tool. For this reason, the tool should have strong change tracking feature. It should provide mechanisms for people to query full history of any artifact changes. It should provide APIs to the history logs, so that integration platform can easily detect and propagate changes across various best-of-breed tools in the ecosystem while maintaining history. This helps in ensuring all the activity information is properly synced to connected systems.