Identifying Pitfalls of System Integration -- An Exploratory Study

Due to the continuously growing possibilities provided by technology and its wider application, today's IT products are becoming more and more complex both from technical and managerial standpoints. Very often, multiple parties are involved in their development. Consequently, the organization of the integration and testing of these products gets increasingly complex. Organisations already encounter all kinds of problems, causing the attention for adequate system integration and system integration testing to become neglected. In this paper, the authors describe the pitfalls of today's system integration and system integration testing practices from a double-perspective view: business administrative IT products and software- intensive technical products (a.k.a. embedded software products).