On the design of a maintainable software development kit to implement integration solutions

Abstract

Companies typically rely on applications purchased from third parties or developed at home to support their business activities. It is not uncommon that these applications were not designed taking integration into account. Enterprise Application Integration provides methodologies and tools to design and implement integration solutions. Camel, Spring Integration, and Mule range amongst the most popular open-source tools that provide support to implement integration solutions. The adaptive maintenance of a software tool is very important for companies that need to reuse existing tools to build their own. We have analysed 25 maintainability measures on Camel, Spring Integration, and Mule. We have conducted a statistical analysis to confirm the results obtained with the maintainability measures, and it follows that these tools may have problems regarding maintenance. These problems increase the costs of the adaptation process. This motivated us to work on a new proposal that has been carefully designed in order to reduce maintainability efforts. Guaraná SDK is the software tool that we provide to implement integration solutions. We have also computed the maintainability measures regarding Guaraná SDK and the results suggest that maintaining it is easier than maintaining the others. Furthermore, we have conducted an industrial experience to demonstrate the application of our proposal in industry.