IBM Rational Ensemble or IBM Rational Ensemble

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

Screenshots of new IBM Rational Jazz products

[EDIT: This post is from 2008 if you want a preview of the new 2011 product suite see here]

 

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

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Here’s some screenshots and spy shots of some of the new tools:

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)

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The following are currently Rational Labs projects and may not make future products in their current form

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 UK

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

When can you get the Jazz based Rational Tools?

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

Open Space as the PDC

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.

RSDC 2008 Day 3: Shatner, Jazz, Speaking, Universal, Party

A great day 3 at RSDC. Bill Shatner did his guest speaking slot this morning – I thought he was very funny, even though I’ve read some of the stories before in his autobiography (Up Til Now). The Shat was on form, self-deprecating, endearing and funny.

Straight afterwards we had a great meeting with one of the key Jazz fellas about incorporating some of the IJI stuff into RTC. Great ideas – I just hope there’s enough will, time, money, resources etc. etc. to achieve them Always a problem in a company that’s got one million and one great ideas!

I had my two talks today – talk one on RPM went well and talk two on practice based RUP deployment went really well. If you were at either talks and asked a question then thankyou because we had really good and engaging questions at both talks. If you didn’t come, then come next year! We do good talks

At the end of the day we had the special event at Universal Studios. I’ve been to the one in LA before (recently burned down!) but not the Florida one. I didn’t really enjoy the LA Universal Studios but that may have been bad theme park management on my part. Tonight Bryon, Matt and I decided to embark on a mission of scamming the rides. This involved trying to cheat, charm, schmooze or otherwise get ourselves onto the first row of every ride multiple times without queuing. I’m proud to report that by indulging in just the right combination of bravado, honesty and linguistics we succeeded every time and as a result I’m sure we enjoyed more rides than anyone else. The MiB ride was a lot of fun and with Matt firmly in support despite his prevalence for motion sickness we went on three times without queuing and thoroughly beat the other teams by an order of magnitude 8) Then we went to the Mummy ride (I think they had this at LA but I missed it when I went a few years ago). That was awesome, lots of forwards and backwards, fire and roller coaster goodness. We scammed it well and went in a lift somewhere off the beaten track and talked our way into the front of the queue again. Finally we went to the Simpsons ride. A virtual roller coaster (which would make you think “rubbish” but was incredible!) ride which of course we scammed by a combination of honesty and charm to go twice in a row in car 1.

In total we saw Fear Factor Live (ok), did 7 runs on the major rides (awesome) had dinner and perhaps one or two beers all in a short couple of hours. A resounding success 8) And much better than last year! Bumped into fellow blogger Kellypuffs a few times too

After returning to the hotel it was time for cocktails and karaoke which is a bit like a baby holding an apple. Please note I did not, have not, and will not sing. Garth Andrews did a remarkably good Elvis karaoke though, not for the first time! A lot of people were celebrating the end of the conference (for some – as the exhibition hall is now closed so all the sales and marketing people go home) or the middle of a hard week of massive information overload and not enough sleep for everyone else. I feel sorry for the people that are speaking first thing on Thurs morning (tomorrow). Especially as then a number of people decided that a late night swim and pool party would be a good idea!

RSDC 2008 Day 1: Jazz, Sushi, Wallflowers

Today was day 1 of the RSDC 2008. I’ve already been busy for a couple of days but today was the proper first day. Unfortunately I spent the beginning a little hung over. I turned up to the keynote presentation at 8am local time with a bit of a headache – after watching the acrobatics and suffering the loud noise I had an even worse headache – oops With only myself to blame I soldiered on to experience many cool things today:

Lots of Jazz stuff

Today IBM Rational officially announced both Rational Requirements Composer and Rational Quality Manager. Also Rational Team Concert has got a lot of press. I blogged a while ago about RRC and RQM (here) so it was good to finally see these products.

Rational Composer is especially interesting to me as it a new Jazz based tool that allows you to manage requirements, create process flow diagrams, GUI mock-ups, manage glossary terms, create traceability and even create Use Case Docs in a single environment. Of course there is integration with Requisite Pro but it seems clear to me that in the long-ish term the products will converge until ReqPro is no longer necessary. I’m looking forward to the GA release of Requirements Composer, and especially the future release that is fully Jazz enabled, making use of Jazz SCM for requirements management and integrating deeply into the other Jazz products. I said previously on my blog that Reqiurements Composer was due for open beta today, but the word is that it will be next week! I’m impressed by this product and I think it will really help people that want to elicit requirements – all the way from organisational business analysts to project business analysts and system analysts. It’s a cool product.

I also saw today the Microsoft Visual Studio client for Rational Team Concert. As a .Net developer myself and someone that works with clients that have heterogeneous environments this is particularly important to me. So far there are some VS native windows for Jazz views such as Team Artifacts and Work Items but I’ve not really seen what the relationship to TFS/VSTS is. Also at the moment some of the views (particularly of work item details) are through the web interface in a html pane inside Visual Studio rather than in a native VS plugin interface – although I’m assured this is to come soon. It’s good to see IBM Rational focussing on integrating with other platform and vendors. As most users would probably say though – I want it now!

Other interesting elements included the news about Rational Project Management and Rational Enterprise Reporting, not to mention the new governance tools from IBM Research including

• 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

All of the above are native Jazz tools and indicate the bright shiny new Jazz future. It seems obvious to me that these tools and will be the future path in the long term for Rational Portfolio Manager

Rational Team Concert will be the first generally available product and will be released towards the end of this month – here’s a screenshot of IJI EssWork in Team Concert just because I’ve been playing with it:

(cliccy piccy)

Many other things caught my eye today – including an excellent presentation on RPM by Scott Craig that happened to include some ideas that I think will seed solutions for some of the problems faced by my own RPM implementation at the moment at my favourite client.

I also liked the look of IBM Rational Self Check as it’s a good tool for supporting what I and my team have been doing manually for years. In fact the Self Check screenshots look remarkably like the measurements slides in my RUP implementation case study! If only this tool had been available 4 years ago! Rational Self Check is part of the focus on measuring practice adoption and the IBM Rational Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF) – of course practice adoption and measurement is something that we know rather a lot about at IJI

The hat

image shamefully nicked from kelly

Met Kelly and Ferdy

It was cool to meet up with some folks who I’ve previously only interacted with online. I think we need to setup a group photo of us all

The Wallflowers gig

More gratuitous photo stealing from kelly:

Ian (Spence) had to point out to me that the lead singer (Jakob Dylan) was the son of Bob Dylan – which once he’d told me it was actually pretty obvious. Clearly I need to be more in touch! There were sparkly cups at the wallflowers gig too, obviously I grabbed a couple to take home for my boys (clicky piccy):

Sushi with the Wallflowers

After the exhibition centre and after the wallflowers gig we went over to Kimonos in the Swan for some Sushi and cocktails, the Wallflowers took the table next to us and it wasn’t long before our group and there’s were intermingled. They were kind enough, after getting hassled by Bryon Baker, to sign some autographs for Garth’s kids 8)

Bryon (and others) at karaoke

Speaking of Bryon, he did a funnygreat rendition of Coca Cabana with Gina, I got the vid on my phone so I’ll upload it and post it tomorrow

The ribbons

And here’s an updated pic of the copious number of ribbons I have this year. They’re a good conversation starter though

RSDC 2008 Day -1 (Saturday)

I’ve arrived at the Swan and Dolphin hotel in Orlando with my co-speakers Matt Archer and Linda Weedon (see our talks here). One the flight over the space shuttle Discovery flew past our plane on the way to the International Space Station – unfortunately I didn’t get any pics, but there’s a rocket take off on Thursday so I’ll take and upload some pics when that happens 8)

Also on our plane just behind our seats was John Terry and his family (he’s a famous English footballer, Chelsea Captain and England Captain). He had his two kids with him who were very sweet and made me think of my kiddies back home!

So this is Day -1 because tomorrow is the Business Partner day and then the conference proper start for most people on Monday. Tonight there’s a business partner reception – although I have no idea where it is yet. Must go search the web…

Lucky I did search – the business partner reception is tomorrow evening. In that case it must be dinner time, I’m hungry. Also I’ll find out if the other IJI folk are up to anything this evening.

New: Rational Quality Manager and Rational Requirements Composer

A while ago I blogged about the upcoming announcement of a new Rational Quality Manager tool that was going to be announced at the RSDC2008 in June. Well now IBM are leaking the existence of this tool on a new blog http://qualitymanager.wordpress.com and they plan to launch an open beta on the first day of the conference (June 1st).

Rational Quality Manager, or RQM as it will undoubtedly be called, is the next generation Test Management tool from IBM Rational which will replace the old Rational Test Manager and ClearQuest Test Manager to provide a substantial competitor to Mercury’s HP’s Quality Center. RQM is Jazz based making RQM part of Rational’s 2nd generation software development platform including Rational Team Concert, the new Rational Requirements Composer and others.

Rational Quality Manager has been described as “a collaborative web-based quality management solution which offers comprehensive test planning and test asset management for the software lifecycle”.

Rational Requirements Composer has been described as a tool to help “elicit and define requirements for business driven-development”. The IBM Rational Requirements Definition and Management Open Beta website isn’t up yet, but it will be next week on this URL.

You can expect open betas for Rational Quality Manager and Rational Requirements Composer to be made available at the beginning of next week. Watch this space for more info as it comes along…

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.