Oracle Team Productivity Center

Oracle Team Productivity Center is an Application Lifecycle Management tool that enables software development teams to collaborate and work productively together when developing applications using JDeveloper.

Team working is enhanced through the introduction of the Team Navigator providing integration with multiple ALM repositories, allowing users to query and update work items in those repositories from within JDeveloper. Additional services such as collaboration and contextual linking of work items through tags and relationships enhance the productivity of users. Context information about development files can be saved against a work item and restored by the user.

TPC maximizes investment in skills, processes and resources of teams and technologies through:

• Providing unified access to, and increasing existing value in, existing ALM tools in JDeveloper
• Maintaining quick and flexible hierarchies of teams and users leading to greater collaboration and reduced functional silos
• Integrating ALM artifacts from disparate sources resulting in better information, process flow and linkages between artifacts.

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Application Lifecycle Management can be described as the management of the lifecycle development practices (requirements, build, test, change control, defect management etc) integrated together through application of process, reporting, traceability and collaboration. The better this integration, the better the software. In the past many of these practices worked in isolation - in functional silos that did not lend themselves to collaboration. However, collaboration has become increasingly necessary in the software development world where teams work across organizations, time zones, cultures and business functions.

Oracle Team Productivity Center provides a connector framework to enable third party Application Lifecycle Management tools to be integrated into Oracle JDeveloper. Currently connectors are available for

• Bugzilla - defect tracking system
• JIRA - bug tracking, issue tracking and project management
• Microsoft Project Server - task management
• Rally Software - agile development lifecycle
• Tasks - built-in Task repository to create, edit and track team tasks

The integration of these repositories in JDeveloper enables users to directly interact with their ALM artifacts whilst working in their IDE. TPC provides centralized services such as contextual linking, tagging and referencing of development artifacts across repositories to provide further integration of disparate repository artifacts. Additionally, Oracle TPC provides configurable team management facilities designed to improve productivity and communication among team members.

The Oracle Team Productivity Center Developer Guide provides details on how to develop a connector to integrate a third-party ALM repository with JDeveloper. The TPC connector infrastructure allows ALM repositories to be instantiated and a UI exposed directly inside of JDeveloper. Through the published interface built on open standards, the connector can expose repository fields using a meta-driven user interface and support basic create/update/delete operations on those objects. Each connector can support a number of artifact object types each with multiple user interface definitions. The connector also defines what fields in each artifact type are queryable by the user and how to query them. By implementing the connector interface and supplying some XML metadata to define a connector, a developer can quickly integrate their own repository into the Team Productivity Center framework, allowing any 3rd party repository to easily be exposed inside of JDeveloper. This developer guide is available in the JDeveloper Help Center. To facilitate developing a connector, a sample connector together with the source code is available for download

Oracle Team Productivity Center is available for free from this Web site. It consists of:

• Server install: a platform-independent JAR file. Full details are contained in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Installation Guide for Oracle Team Productivity Center Server
• Client software: a JDeveloper extension. Available by selecting Help ->Check for Updates, or downloadable here, it is installed like any other JDeveloper extension.
• Connectors: to integrate ALM repositories into JDeveloper. Require both a server install (as detailed in the installation guide) and installation in JDeveloper as extensions. The Oracle JDeveloper Help Center contains detailed instructions on installing connectors and using Oracle Team Productivity Center. This help is available once the client software has been installed