What is the “Integrate Button”?
When I was working for a large IT company in the 1990s, I worked on a large project with over 70 developers. Software Integration was a key concern for us. At this time, I saw a full-page advertisement in an IT magazine showing a picture of a button (much like your Enter key). At the bottom of the ad, it read “If Only It Were This Easy”. I’m certain it had nothing to do with software integration, in the way I think of it, but it made an impact on me. Because, this is how I thought software integration should be: the click of a button. I worked in a group called “System Services” which provided “software infrastructure” for the project. For instance, I wrote utilities and frameworks for other developers to use. I wrote a security privileges system, a diagnostics utility and so on. If you’ve ever written for other developers, you know they/we can be a difficult lot to please. Anyway, I hung this ad in my cubicle as a reminder and metaphor for how integration should be. The good news is that, as an industry, we are getting there in a technical capacity using tools like Ant, CruiseControl and so on. However, we are still a ways off of realizing this as a common practice on projects, which is why I wrote the book and why I work every day to make this a reality with software teams.