Week 3 - Follow up on research

After doing to research the main issue I have found is Integration simplicity. “When integrating an application into an enterprise, developers should strive to minimize changing the application and minimize the amount of integration code needed.” I am finding that this did not happen. It was not easy to bring everything over. There where some changes to the code that had to me made. There were also some things that the developers just could not figure out how to bring the data over. In the end the employees had to come in on a Saturday and manually move the information over; meaning re-key in the data in the new system.

There is also a lot of customization being done. That is because there is a place on the intranet where you can enter in feature request. The analyst would still like to see some of the old functionality of the old system. “Changes and new code will usually be necessary to provide good integration functionality.”

In the Enterprise Integration Patterns the author talks about application coupling and that “applications should minimize their dependencies on each other so that each can evolve without causing problems for the others because when the applications change and break those assumptions, the integration breaks.” Ideally we would each application to communicate with each other, he does have a point. What id one system goes down or one system becomes legacy and has to be migrated over? I’m finding that when each branch of the company had its own system for some reason things seemed to go smoother. Now we have to worry about one system not being synced up with another or another system not being updated so it can feed the system and just so many more things of that nature.