Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is important for product development as the amount of software and also the liability of software increases in today's products. At Aras we have multiple initiatives regarding ALM - from connecting to a repository, to connection to ALM solutions, and even building our own ALM solution. In this blog post I wanted to illustrate, using federation, how we could integrate Aras PLM with GitLab serving as an ALM.
Quick Overview of GitLab
For those who have not heard yet about GitLab, it is a web-based Git repository manager with the classic GitHub features like issue tracking, wiki and some sort of project management features. But it also has the full continuous integration process handler to cover the whole lifecycle of your software development. It has made some noise the past few months after they raised an additional $20 million on a series B investment.
The Goals
The goal is not to pull developers away from GitHub. There are two main goals that are clearly defined for Product managers / Configuration managers:
- Capture a specific software release and its related build to make sure we can capture the full fixed content of a product structure snapshot or release.
- Have a quick overview of software development progress without having to switch to another interface/software.
Integration Methodology
We will rely on federation for this use case. We will use the REST interface provided by GitLab to retrieve the repository information.
On Parts with the "Software" classification, there is a relationship to the Repository Item. There's also a Software Tag property in order to have a fixed relationship to a specific tag when a product structure (containing this software) is released.
The Code
The editor below contains the code to get all the commits in the repository.
If you want to see the full scope of the integration please contact Aras Labs via Twitter (@ArasLabs) or email. I can provide more code and we may push an open source project on GitHub if there is enough interest.
A Few Snapshots :)
Repository View
Part (Software) View
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