Issues and effort in integrating data from heterogeneous software repositories and corporate databases

Software repositories and corporate databases capture different fragments of a project's history. Software cockpits integrate the data from these repositories and databases to provide a holistic view of the project and the capability to drill-down and analyze details. By incorporating existing data, the cockpit can be used effectively from the first day it is introduced. In this paper we describe our findings from integrating several repositories and databases for a large, distributed project. We highlight common issues in data integration, report on the resulting effort for the development of software cockpits, and share our lessons learned from this data integration project.