RSDC UK 2008 Review

So RSDC UK is over and I’m finally getting a chance to blog about it. It was cool to meet so many old friends and new make new connections. There were even some blog readers that were able to recognise me IRL by mentally adding 6 years and a beard on to my blog picture Very impressive!

I think it was the best UK Rational event for a long time, and there were some great speakers. Unfortunately the chairs were uncomfortable, some of the rooms too small and the venue would do well to invest in some air conditioning. I suspect that going to an event at the Royal College of Phyicians in the height of summer (assuming we ever have one in this country again) would be enough cause to need a doctor. Regardless of that, and the amount of walking up and down stairs I did, I think it was a great event. The buzz was mainly about the Jazz platform and associated tools (RTC, RQM, RRC).

Day 1

The conference was opened by Graham Spittle (IBM SWG UKISA VP) and Danny Sabbah (IBM Rational Worldwide VP) who set the scene well for Erich Gamma (in real life) and Grady Booch (in Second Life). Unfortunately the Second Life link went belly up and we did’t get all of Grady’s keynote. Which must have been extremely annoying for Grady since it was 3:30am for him! Erich then took over and gave an excellent Rational Team Concert demo (RTC). When he started his demo I was a bit worried he was going to cover all of my planned demo too, but fortunately it didn’t overlap completely. Since he did the Monday keynote and I did the last slot on Tuesday there was enough time and quantity of information for the delegates so a little overlap didn’t hurt. Erich also did a panel discussion on Agile development in the context of Geographically Distributed Development along with Scott Ambler and Julian Holmes moderated by Anthony Kesterton.

The great TQ (Terry Quatrani) was also present speaking on Agile Modelling, I had a meeting to attend so unfortunately didn’t get to see her speak which is a shame because she’s always great. I did speak to people that did go who just confirmed that I’d have rather gone than have a meeting!

Following the break it was then time for me to speak along with Linda Weedon of PwC and Matt Archer (also of IJI) on “CUPID – Implementing the IBM Rational Unified Process at PricewaterhouseCoopers” which is all about our experiences in deploying UP using a practice based approach. I think the session went really well, we had some pertinent questions which is always a good sign of people staying awake and listening To close the day Ian Spence gave an excellent (as usual) talk on “Conversations in Context: Using Use Cases on Agile Projects”. Following an excellent dinner and a few glasses of wine kindly provided by a competitor it was time to commute home and eventually get to sleep at around 1am. It’s much easier at conferences when you’re staying at or really close to the venue! During the dinner there was a caricature artist or two wondering around who came to our table. Naturally we volunteered Ian to be caricatured and I managed to take a quick pic with my phone of him with his Mad Scientist caricature.

Ian Spence - the Mad Scientist

It’s a little known fact that Ian is also a Kung Fu master which is why his hand appears blurred in this pic. Fractions of a second later my phone was whisked from my hand at the speed of lightening.

Day 2

Day 2 was for some peculiar reason started 30mins earlier than day 1. This didn’t impress me, especially since like most people I hadn’t noticed until I was texted while on the train on the way in. Fortunately I was early enough anyway to get there on time. Mike O’Rourke opened the day with some description of the Rational 2.0 Roadmap (Jazz and future products). Rumours were confirmed about Rational Project Management and Rational Enterprise Reporting being released Q1 next year.

Ivar Jacobson then gave an excellent keynote on “Back to basics: Getting Good Software Quickly and at Low Cost” which focussed on using practices in a smart way, not following processes. I’ve seen Ivar speak many times, and many times on practice based development, which isn’t that surprising since I work for him but it’s always entertaining to hear the man speak.

I also had some meetings on Day 2 but the sessions that really stood out for me were Peter Eeles talking on “The Rise of the Development Environment Architect” which was based on his paper on DevelopWorks. This is an excellent formalisation of something that has been part of my job for some time. I also enjoyed Derek Holt’s talk on “RTC and the Agile Development Strategy”.

Finally to wrap up Day 2 I presented on own this time on “Live Jazz: Process Execution in IBM Rational Team Concert”. This started off with a demo of EssWork in Eclipse, shell sharing with RTC and creating a new process by composing practices as described in Ivar’s slideware at morning keynote. I then started executing my new process in RTC. It was the end of a long two days in a really hot room so I kept it quite light and I think it went well – and hopefully the audience got something different and new from the talk. If you are now kicking yourself that you missed this talk, fear not I’ll be repeating most of it as part of a webinar I’m doing in October – more details here.

Thanks to all those who attended my talks and came and said hello, especially those that read the Mac Daddy! I’ll post the slides in a few days

First Look: IBM Rational Requirements Composer

So I downloaded and installed IBM Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) today. I’m not very good at reading instructions so typically I didn’t read them but I still managed to set up RRC server and connect a client within an hour Excellent job yet again Jazz people, in the past with the “classic” tools this sort of thing wouldn’t have been possible in such a short time. It even co-exists (but isn’t integrated) with my Rational Team Concert installation. At the moment I’ve got two Jazz server instances which is a shame, but this is only a Beta.

Anyway, I used the configuration utility and with only referring to the instructions once or twice I quickly got RRC setup and working. Having said that the config utility uses an embedded IE instance to access the Jazz Admin console and for me that wasn’t working so I gave up on the config utility and just used trusty FireFox.

The client is Eclipse based but isn’t shell sharing with my other eclipse shell at the moment. I’ve created a Test Project and thought about creating some artifacts to go along with it. I can’t see where to edit templates but since this is Jazz based I’m sure that everything is customisable. I’ve got a bunch of errors showing in my logs and in the Jazz admin web UI so I’m not sure if I’m seeing everything anyway. Perhaps reading the instructions is a good idea!

Overview

It’s clear that it’s an early Beta as there’s still a lot of simple UI bugs but the point of these releases is not to provide a finished product but to give people that are interested a chance to get to grips with the functionality and look and feel. So here’s some of my thoughts and screenshots (clicky piccies):

I set about creating a process diagram

Then a glossary that supported some of the terms that I identified in thinking about the business process

I also played around with creating a Use Case diagram

Because I’ve got a software development background I immediately decided to mock up a UI and screen flow rather than consider any of those pesky requirement things

At this point it seemed like a good idea to think about writing an initial Use Case specification, this was cool because I could integrate the various things I’ve done already such as embed the UI mockup, link to the business process and have glossary management done for me too

All of which left me with some cross linked integrated stuff to do with capturing my requirements as regards eating doughnuts

Conclusions

It’s quite easy to start setting up a set of integrated stuff including storyboards, process diagrams, use cases, UI mockups etc. and is very non-technical to use. Personally I found the UI mockup functionality to be limited, I’d prefer more free form drawing capability when I create a “sketch” it would take me longer to mock up a UI here than it would for me to build it in Visual Studio – but then again this is aimed at analysts that may not be able to use IDEs. The UI seems very windows based as well, what about trusty web widgets!

I’d like to get at the project template and see what can be done in terms of the elements and strucutre of the project, not to mention document templates for things like Use Cases.

Does this replace RequisitePro? No. Although it’s got requiremetns authoring, marking and linking RRC doesn’t yet provide full traceability management and (at least at the moment) I can’t see where I’d go about attributing and managing requirements attributes. That’s why RRC has integration into ReqPro to provide these things.

Personally I’d like to see versionable requirements artifacts, more flexible UI sketching, traceability management, attribute management and more integration into other Rational tools such as Rational Software Architect and Team Concert.

This is a good start in terms of providing a single tool to support requirements elicitation and elaboration, all the diagrams and docs in one place, easily distributed and collaborated on. I’ll look forward to seeing more of it as time goes by

6 days to RSDC 2008

Just 6 days to go until the IBM Rational Software Developers Conference 2008. Those of us going fromIvar Jacobson International (IJI) (and there’s a few of us!) had a conference call on Friday to discuss our plan for the Conference. IJI is a silver sponsor this year and as well as our 7 presentations we’re going to be doing something special that will turn all of the conference attendees into R-Heroes

It’s a big secret until the Tuesday of the conference though so I can’t say anything about it here. Make sure you come and visit our stand at booth #713. You can’t miss it, it’s the one at the bottom of the main escalators into the exhibition hall when you’re coming from the hotel lobby. You can come and talk to people like Ivar Jacobson, Ian Spence, Kurt Bittner, Robert Maksimchuk, David West, Eric Naiburg, and a bunch of others, including me of course. We also have two hand held GPS systems to give away if you register at our booth.

There’s going to be a lot of interesting announcements especially around Jazz at the conference, and for business partners there’s going to be a preview this Wednesday – but that will also be secret until the conference! At the conference you’ll be able to see demos of EssWork integrated with Eclipse, Visual Studio Team System or even Jazz Team Concert if you catch me. Our Team Concert integration is likely to be an exciting direction in the future as I think Team Concert is an ideal execution environment for EssUP.

My first Jazz (Team Concert) Demo

So I just finished my first proper Jazz demo with my favourite customer. I demo’d Team Concert both in Eclipse based on my own process template based on EssUP from IJI and also in my trusty FireFox. We also went and looked at the project dashboard for the Jazz project itself hosted on jazz.net

The best thing about demoing or even just playing with Jazz is how easy it is to setup and play with. The guys in the Jazz development team have done a great job in making it accessible and consumable. You can literally just download the server and client, unzip, run the server through a batch file then start accessing the clients. From download to up and running took me about 3 minutes the first time I tried it. Compare this to wanting to play with something like RPM and the other Rational tools and you’d be banging your head against walls!

Team Concert is a great product – I just want to see the technology integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio. And of course to see what other Jazz tools are going to be announced at the RSDC in a few weeks time.

Here’s what’s happening around Rational Team Concert and Jazz at the RSDC

• Keynote: The Rational 2.0 Product Roadmap – Powered by Jazz
• Jazz BoF
• Jazz Live! reception
• Jazz Cafe
• Presentations
• Exhibits in the Solution Center and Rational Labs

Check out my preview posts in this blog on what’s coming up a this years RSDC .

Here’s a screen shot of my very important risk list in my test project

(click for full size)

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