Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration

The Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) is an open (Creative Common Attribution license) specification for standardised data exchange between lifecycle tools.

OSLC is being driven primarily by IBM as an extension from their JAZZ framework.

IBM did not support a previous attempt by Serena to produce a common data exchange framework (ALF) as they were developing their own Jazz framework at the time. ALF subsequently failed to attract sufficient support across the industry and consequently ALF was retired.

It is difficult to gauge the support for OSLC. It is tempting to suggest that OSLC will suffer the same fate as ALF unless IBM can establish it as a defacto standard. It is unlikely that IBM will be able to do this because the ALM tool market is so fragmented that no one tool supplier is dominant enough to have enough momentum in the market to establish a defacto standard.

The general lacklustre support for OSLC among tool vendors does not bode well for its future. Kovair are using OSLC in their Omnibus product, which uses the OSLC framework and Kovair supplied adaptors to interface to a subset of the more common ALM tools.