Software In-House Integration - Quantified Experiences from Industry

When an organization faces new types of collaboration, for example after a company merger, there is a need to consolidate the existing in-house developed software. There are many high-level strategic decisions to be made, which should be based on as good foundation as possible, while these decisions must be made rapidly. Also, one must employ feasible processes and practices in order to get the two previously separate organizations to work towards a common goal. In order to study this topic, we previously performed an explorative and qualitative multiple case study, where we identified a number of suggested practices as well as other concerns to take into account. This paper presents a follow-up study, which aims at validating and quantifying these previous findings. This study includes a questionnaire distributed to in-house integration projects, aiming at validation of earlier findings. We compare the data to our previous conclusions, present observations on retirement of the existing systems and on the technical similarities of the existing systems. We also present some practices considered important but often neglected