Overall Satisfaction with MKS Integrity
With 20 different teams of 8 developers each working on different paced projects with one single code base, our company decided MKS Integrity would be a great solution to purchase. MKS Integrity was chosen after reviewing products by IBM, Atlassian and a few other open source products. The great thing about MKS Integrity is that it is more of a toolbox of components rather than a tool. You can take components and make them work exactly the way you want your solution to work. For example, we started off by using this strictly for an SVN replacement. We only needed a couple of projects with many sandboxes. Then we used the toolkit to migrate away from another project management tool and track all change requests through customized screens in MKS. The change requests had strict workflows, allowing better management and control over changes. Then the company designed a QA process and issue tracking within MKS. Then came the help desk software replacement with further build out of Integrity. Over time, we replaced almost all of the one off applications/solutions used by Dev, QA, HelpDesk, Business Development & Project Management into one single solution MKS.
- Independent development sandboxes that allows each team to work on projects without affecting the delivery of other projects.
- Change packages - identifying exactly what artifacts were changed for a given request (bug fix, enhancement, user story).
- Integrity objects - "building blocks" - ability to create any type of container for help desk, QA, development, requirements. These are highly customizable and some simple javascript code can help with validation and workflow triggers.
- Connectivity/client loading issues - probably not as often as I would deem a show stopper for the solution, but we had experienced a lot of connectivity issues when trying to merge or perform a backfill. Or when trying to open the integrity client, we would experience some type of configuration file corruption. We had to keep a few command prompt scripts ready to go on our desktops to kill off the old corrupted files so that integrity would launch.
- One of the selling points for Integrity was the quick rollback functionality. Yes, rolling back code was easier than other solutions with tools to inspect change packages, etc, but it required mostly manual effort.
- Increased Employee Efficiency
- Better Visibility and Productivity
- Better collaboration
MKS Integrity is a toolbox of components that you can use to create any Software Change Configuration Management system to fit your own organization. This was the main reason why we went with Integrity over the other solutions that were evaluated.
Using MKS Integrity
200 - Business Analysts, Quality Analysts, Help Desk and Support Teams, Development teams, Management, Release Management
4 - Software developer, logical thinker, javascript expert
- Source Control
- Requirements Gathering & Change Control Process
- Testing & Issue Reporting
- Helpdesk/Call Center ITIL
- 20 + teams all working on the same single code base and each one having the liberty to work independently until it is time to merge with main line.
- Automated integration from web forms
- Discovery & Documents storage
MKS Integrity Implementation
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled