The Mac Daddy

The Beta for IBM Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) is now available

You can get it from Rational here

Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) is a requirements definition solution that enables organizations to enhance their requirements processes with easy-to-use elicitation and definition capabilities and provides various visualisation, documentation and collaboration capabilities. Draw UI mockups, write Use Cases etc. etc.

Rational Requirements Composer is based on the IBM Jazz architecture and from what I’ve seen is pretty cool. At one point it was two separate tools, one for UI mockups and another for requirements documentation. These two projects were unified into RRC so that this tool is appropriate for Business Analysts, System Analysts and UI Designers/User Experience people.

See here for more Jazz screenshots and this blog post for more info on the future of RequisitePro and Doors

After over a year of work my team finally managed to go live with RPM (Rational Portfolio Manager) this week. On time. Bizarre as that sounds, in fact we actually went live a day early but didn’t tell anyone

We’ve been using RPM at a particular client with a small subset of the user base to capture demand for projects and therefore the development budget for the year since March, as of the 1st of July we went live to the rest of the user base which involved:

• A tool upgrade from 7.0.5.5 to 7.1.1.1 - not as simple as it sounds in a completely outsourced operational environment
• A whole load of security configuration, layouts, process definitions etc.

Now we just need people to use it!

Just to be confusing there are two distinct things called “IBM Rational Ensemble”.

IBM Rational Ensemble - Rational Labs Project

One is a Rational Labs project that is built on Jazz technology and is focussed on improving team collaboration by connecting users with other users that may be working on similar things as well as searching historic work item information to offer comparisons to past work. This is currently code named IBM Rational Ensemble

Improve team collaboration Awareness of similar work Tracks historic assignments Links team members

More Jazz screenshots here

IBM Rational Ensemble - Business Partner Group

The other thing called IBM Rational Ensemble is “a gathering of business partners around IBM’s exciting Jazz technology! Our vision and purpose, is to create excitement and buzz around this new technology.” Somehow I think it’s this latter definition that’s going to win in this struggle for the name

Of course Ivar Jacobson International is part of the IBM Rational Ensemble which is great as it means we can get eary info on Jazz and the new Jazz products. The future is funky

I recently put together a presentation for IJI on IBM Rational Jazz and the new, and future, Jazz -based products. Rather than present bullet points about products I like to show demos where possible and screenshots otherwise as like many people I find that I need to see a tool to gain an understanding of it. This presented me with a bit of a problem because most of these tools aren’t released yet, and some are only ideas from Rational Labs rather than actual listed products. But I managed to get screenshots or at least spy shots for the presentation so I thought I’d share.

You can download the whole presentation here, it’s in PDF form though so you don’t get the animation or Rational Team Concert demo vids (if you’re an IJIer just drop me an email if you want the full demo videos)

Download

Rational Team Concert

Rational Team Concert (RTC) is a collaborative project execution environment providing source control, work item tracking, build management and reporting capabilities as well as supporting agile planning. RTC is the first Jazz based product and at the moment the best known. The demo includes some early integration between Esswork and RTC.

Early access packages of RTC are available now from jazz.net

Rational Quality Manager

Rational Quality Manager (RQM) is a business-driven software quality portal for people seeking a collaborative and customizable solution for test planning, workflow control, tracking and metrics reporting capable of quantifying how project decisions and deliverables impact and align with business objectives.

RQM should be available around the 7th of July

Rational Requirements Composer

Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) is a requirements definition solution that enables organizations to enhance their requirements processes with easy-to-use elicitation and definition capabilities and provides various visualisation, documentation and collaboration capabilities.

Open Beta pre-registration (Available in July hopefully)

Rational Tempo

Improve estimation through: Tracking probabilities Schedule extrapolation Risk management

Rational Ensemble

Improve team collaboration Awareness of similar work Tracks historic assignments Links team members

There is also business partner collective called IBM Rational Ensemble which is not the same thing as this Rational Labs project!

Rational Governor

Improve Governance Specify Governance Solutions Manage Roles and Decisions Automate processes

Rational Financier

Improve Financial Management Specify Governance Solutions Manage Roles and Decisions Automate processes

Software & Systems Quality Conference United Kingdom

Conference 29th - 30th September 2008

Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, London

Coming up in September is the Software and Systems Quality Conference in London (SQC 2008 UK). The SQC is the premier conference for software quality and testing professionals in the UK, this years the SQC will be:

“Exploring what the testing community can do to boost productivity in the business space,  SQC UK will be a hive of activity this year with some fascinating speakers for what promises to be a challenging and potentially controversial conference theme: “Never to too busy - the role of testing in improving productivity”

Notice the lack of quality assurance here in the use of “to” and “too”

A good friend and colleague of mine, Matt Archer, who recently co-spoke with me at RSDC 2008 will be speaking on “A Thinking Framework for Context - Driven Test Documentation” - here’s the first paragraph from his abstract:

“Whenever the topic of documentation is discussed, it always reminds me of the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In this story, a family of three bears live in a house in the woods. One day, the bears go for a walk, leaving their house unlocked. While they are out, Goldilocks enters the house and discovers three bowls of porridge. The bowls have been heated to each bears’ specific taste so when Goldilocks samples the porridge she finds that the father’s porridge is “too hot”, the mother’s porridge is “too cold”, but the cub’s porridge is “just right”.

Read the full abstract here

It’s got me on the first line Should be an entertaining and interesting talk, so if you’re in the Quality/Testing space then attend this conference and go and see Matt’s talk on Monday 29th at 11.30 - 12.10

You can create tag clouds a bit like over on the right here from tweets using Tweet Cloud Beta

Here’s mine: linky

It’s not released yet though, to find out when it’s released in your time click here

I’ve seen some comments about the fact that at the RSDC2008 Rational announced 22 products. I think many bloggers and article writers may have got a little confused by all the hype. Rational certainly made some very important product announcements and the Rational Labs in the exhibition centre were fantastic in terms of showing us some previews of what’s coming in the future. These announcements and lab previous are the primary reason why I said it was the best RSDC in years. However there weren’t 22 new products announced! It breaks down like this in terms of what the analysts have been writing/bloggin:

IBM Rational announced pricing and availability for a swath of 22 products:

• There are 6 new IBM Rational products that are native Jazz products (6)
• Updates to five existing Rational tools that add Jazz enablement/capabilities (5)
• plans for certified add-in products from 11 Rational partners (11)

6+5+11 = 22

Personally I’ve struggled to put these numbers in context. I think I’m fairly aware of the new Rational stuff that’s coming along but I can’t quite get the numbers to add up, so the rest of this post is about what I’m aware of, please comment if you have any more/contrary information: (Edit: see the comments on this post for a clarification on the numbers from IBM)

New Jazz based tools:

1. IBM Rational Team Concert (may not count as it’s been announced for 2 years)
2. IBM Rational Quality Manager
3. IBM Rational Requirements Composer
4. IBM Rational Financier
5. IBM Rational Governor
6. IBM Rational Tempo
7. IBM Rational Ensemble (not to be confused with the IBM Rational Ensemble that is a business partner collective!)
8. IBM Rational Enterprise Reporting
9. IBM Rational Project Management

I’m counting 9 not 6

As for the 5 updated, these will be ClearQuest, ClearCase, ReqPro, RPM (arguably) and…? I’m not sure where AppScan fits in with this stuff. It’s great tool and will clearly integrate with Rational Quality Manager but I don’t know where it fits in with the 22? announcements. Similar questions can be asked about the Telelogic tools.

Anyway here’s what I’m tracking in terms of the new IBM Rational Jazz tools:

Rational Team Concert

Release Candidate 4(Jazz.net registration required) is currently available for downloading, the production release is sceduled for mid 2008 with the enterprise release scheduled for October 2008 (that’s the one I’d use for piloting)

Also

IBM Rational are running a number of open betas for some of the new tools that were announced at last weeks RSDC. They’re not generally available yet but will be soon. Specifically:

Rational Quality Manager

This open beta program includes two new Rational products and three enhanced versions of Rational products that you already know:

• NEW* IBM® Rational® Quality Manager v8.0
• NEW* IBM® Rational® Test Lab Manager v8.0 Extension**
  **This extension is included in Rational Quality Manager for the open beta but will be available under separate license for GA.
• ENHANCED* IBM® Rational® Performance Tester v8.0
• ENHANCED* IBM® Rational® Functional Tester v8.0
• ENHANCED* IBM® Rational® Service Tester for SOA Quality v8.0

Open Beta pre-registration - get emailed when the open beta gets released on (currently) June 24th 2008

There will also be some open web demos on June 24th so you can get an overview without pre-registering for the beta if you wish.

Rational Requirements Composer

This Beta features the latest version of Rational RequisitePro for managing your requirements, as well as a new offering, Rational Requirements Composer, enhancing your abilities to elicit and define requirements for business driven-development.

NEW* IBM Rational Requirements Composer Beta focuses on the following capabilities for requirements definition and management:

• Leverage multiple sources for requirements and organize them in rich documents for context
  • Create requirements and link to supporting documents and external sources
  • Supplement textual content with embedded views of diagrams and sketches
• Develop robust use cases
  • Create simple, informative use-case diagrams
  • Elaborate use cases with rich document descriptions, user interfaces sketches, storyboards, and activity flows
• Build comprehensive business glossaries
  • Interact with rich documents to define and share new terms
  • Link to and verify the usage of existing terms
• Sketch business processes
  • Sketch business processes using a widely recognizable and easily understandable subset of the BPMN notation
  • Link business tasks and decision points to use cases, user interface sketches, and requirements
• Visualize results with user interface sketches and storyboards
  • Elaborate the user experience to further elicit and validate requirements
  • Refactor sketches into reusable parts to quickly build storyboards
  • Easily maintain storyboards as sketch changes are propagated throughout
  • Link requirements to any user interface part
• Collaborate in context to validate and clarify requirements
  • Attach comments to virtually any textual or graphical element
  • Maintain comment threads for conversational context
  • Create requirements from comment content
  • Host reviews within the collaborative environment to facilitate requirements validation and approval
• Integrate Rational Requirements Composer Beta and Rational RequisitePro v7.1 Beta
  • RequisitePro integrations provide requirements traceability across the application lifecycle
  • Enhance requirements content to overcome perception, communication, and information gaps across functions, organizations, and geographies.

ENHANCED* Rational RequisitePro® v7.1 Beta focuses on the following new and improved capabilities:

• RequisitePro client for Web enhancements, including:
  • Improved Microsoft® Word integration: create and edit requirements without taking documents offline
  • Additional project administration capability
  • View rich-text requirements content
  • Run and share BIRT-based reports
• Enhanced security model for enterprise deployments
  • Set permissions on package hierarchies and views
• New BIRT-based reporting option
  • Report designer for custom report design
  • Sample report templates aid in report design
• Baseline Manager improvements
  • Explore baseline contents to gain context beyond baseline comparisons

Open Beta pre-registration - get emailed when the open beta gets released (currently) planned for late June/July 2008

Other tools

Some other tools I’m aware of but don’t have any information on dates (some of these are part of the rational labs research and may never make final products):

• IBM Rational Financier - gives project and program managers insight into the financial value of one ore more projects to help identify and manage risks
• IBM Rational Governor - helps IT organisations manage project roles and associates decision rights including managing the polices that constrain decisions and promote compliance with processes
• IBM Rational Tempo - lets project managers understand and mange the variability of schedule overruns, a key source of risk in software development projects
• IBM Rational Ensemble - reduces risks incurred by communication failures by promoting communication between developers doing related work (see here for info on the business partner group called IBM Rational Ensemble)
• IBM Rational Enterprise Reporting - a reporting interface that sits across all of the Jazz tools, more than just a jazz version of SoDa this tool can replace a lot of the executive dashboard features of tools like RPM
• IBM Rational Project Management - a replacement for Microsoft Project???
• IBM Rational Self Check (see MCIF)

Conclusions

There’s clearly a lot going on in this space and the next few years will be critical in the Rational space as Jazz takes it’s ascendency. It seems obvious to me that the “classic” Rational tools (ReqPro, ClearCase, ClearQuest etc.) will converge with the new Jazz based tools in each area and Rational will provide an upgrade path for each tool so eventually more everyone from the classic tools to the Jazz tools. In my opinion this is a good thing for a number of reasons:

• Rather than purchases of point products integrated point to point, the Jazz project is an architectural focus on the needs of the industry. I’d argue this is long overdue and extremely valuable.
• Distributed teams are accepted as the norm not the exception
• The “classic” tools have needed a facelift for a while
• And more importantly there is a growing trend from Rational towards Practice based process and tooling, something that my company, and me personally, have been evangelising for a while now. The new Jazz tools, the MCIF, practice based approach to process and embracing of agile principles demonstrate a genuine effort in right direction

At IJI we have an internal newsletter than includes a section about software development industry news. For the most recent edition I collated a few links and I think they might be interesting for broader consumption. Of course one of the best links for Microsoft, Rational, Jazz and Borland information is my blog

So subscribe

Here’s the links:

• IBM Announcements homepage: http://tinyurl.com/3svzt7
  - 22 new products announced (well maybe, see my blog post on this topic)
• IBM goes practice based: http://tinyurl.com/4ytk7n - about time too!
• IBM Rational Portfolio Manager discontinued: linky
• Microsoft VSTS Rosario Community Tech Preview released
• MS TechEd Highlights: http://tinyurl.com/47qq9s
  o Silverlight 2 beta 2 (this is the one with .NET runtime included)
  o Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 (in August)
  o Microsoft Oslo - unified modelling platform for MDA in VS.net
• Borland finally dumps CodeGear (JBuilder, Delphi and C++ Builder): http://eclipse.sys-con.com/read/561924.htm

And an addition:

What’s new in terms of Rational Jazz products

I really like this idea:

Open Space

Open Space is a way to bring together groups of people interested in a common topic to have an interactive discussion. In an Open Space session, there may be an expert who is passionate about a topic presenting to an audience or there may be a small group of people discussing an idea.

Four principles of Open Space:

1. Whoever comes are the right people to be there
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened
3. Whenever it starts is the right time
4. When it’s over, it’s over

All you need to do is suggest topics onsite that you wish to discuss and participate in sessions that sound interesting to you. It’s the unconference with content by attendees, for attendees.

That quote comes from this page about UnSessions at the upcoming Microsoft PDC in LA. I went to the last one a few years ago and I’ve been to a few of the IBM Rational RSDC’s and this idea really works for me. I’d like to see that kind of thing going on at the RSDC too.

I’m in two minds as to whether to go to this PDC or not (they don’t happen every year unlike the RSDC, or TechEd). It was certainly extremely valuable going to the last one but this time around I find myself conflicted between needing to grok all things Jazz and similarly needing to grok all things VSTS/TFS, not to mention that I’m a c# developer at heart so I like to keep up with all the techie stuff in the MS space. At the moment I’m thinking that someone from IJI should go but probably not me. If you go, make sure you attend any session or unsession that Anders Hejlsberg is running, he’s always really interesting to listen to and has a brain the size of a planet.