Think strategy: quieter times are not for resting.
This year global pandemic has affected most businesses, and Infomentum is no exception. At the beginning of the spring lockdown, the uncertainty of the future put most organisations into some level of hibernation. For a short period, our team was not as utilised as usual. What did we do? We focused on what would benefit us in the long run: a new strategy, team training, enhancing our internal processes and knowledge repositories. One of the projects that ticked almost all boxes was the revamp of our internal Centre of Excellence (CoE). What is a CoE you ask? It is a cross-functional team responsible for creating and maintaining a centralised Knowledge Hub that offers API projects' best practices, governance, templates, and much more.
We have set up our CoE at the beginning of our MuleSoft Partnership journey years ago. Still, it was time for a 'spring clean' of our library of reusable assets and accelerators. The insights, best practices, tips & tricks, gained throughout the years of working with MuleSoft technology, were used to enrich our Knowledge Hub.
"All our clients get 50 days of acceleration to speed up their API-based integration adoption."
- Dipan Mistry, Head of Integration, Infomentum
How could you benefit from our expertise?
As a part of the Integration Framework and Kick-start Integration Kit, all our customers get access to our extensive Knowledge Hub. It enables them not only to set up their Center of Enablement (CoE) much faster but also to advance their APIs delivery and improve quality. Any asset could be taken off the shelf for reuse and tailored to specific needs if required.
Establishing standards also ensure that all new APIs follow predefined conventions and principles. This approach provides the desired level of consistency from day one. Working with a powerful platform like MuleSoft doesn't guarantee high-quality delivery across all areas of APIs development.
Your project will get a 50 day accelerationWhat happens when standards are set in parallel or even after the API development has started? Based on our experience, it might cause significant rework in the future. We've seen many cases of using the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform to create a mess of point-to-point integrations. These organisations approached us to help them solve numerous problems as they were unable to manage those integration, reuse them and scale. In most case we ended up re-designing and re-developing the existing APIs to comply with the standards. The additional workload frustrates the team and slows down the delivery of the integration project. Don't rush into the APIs development until the foundations are in place!
What will you get access to on day 1?
Now that we explained the importance of establishing clear principles and agreeing on the standards, let's look at what our Knowledge Hub offers:
- reusable and configurable assets such as project templates, API design fragments and custom JSON logger,
- various CI/CD pipelines with Jenkins such as manual builds of a Git repository into CloudHub, builds through trigger points on a pull request merge, deployments by selecting a build artefact off a code repository and deploy into CloudHub,
- pipelines with integrated MUnit detailing out code coverage and unit test results,
- pipelines that trigger MuleSoft Functional Monitoring jobs. These jobs run tests against deployed APIs to verify their success,
- code quality checks against the codebase with SonarQube. They have been tailored to check the code against the defined API coding standards.
We also documented the following:
- predefined standards, conventions and principles around API development,
- common API integration patterns to be used when architecting a solution,
- automation testing principles to help get started on API testing with our automation,
- testing framework.
A glimpse of our MuleSoft Knowledge baseWhat is our customers’ response?
Having invested our time into producing and organising the Knowledge Hub has already proven fruitful. Demonstrating to the potential clients what they would receive on day one, opens their eyes to the journey they could have with MuleSoft and Infomentum. Our CoE has proven invaluable to clients both new to API integration and those already advancing their journey.
The 50 days of acceleration package is now a part of our Integration Framework and Kick-start Integration Kit (KiK). For those who wants to explore further how we help customers save 50 days during the Foundation stage of their integration projects, we've created a series of videos.
If you would like to find out more about our MuleSoft accelerators and how they could boost your integration adoption, contact our experts via the email or give us a call on +44 (0)203 743 8014.
