While Rational Team Concert is the first matured product built on the Jazz platform, there are other products from jazz.net in the beta and development stages. In this book, we will not go into the details of these other products. However, the following is an overview of the various products on Jazz. You can participate and download these products from the IBM website to get an in-depth understanding.
The increasing complexity of the software requires ensuring the quality product by extensive test plans and test coverage. Rational Quality Manager provides a collaborative environment to create test plans and execute them. The product offers the tracking and traceability of requirements to test cases and metric analysis. As a manager, you can get the impact analysis of how the project is affected by project decisions.
In modern day software development, you can imagine that the requirements are coming from multiple stakeholders and in different formats. It is always challenging for you to integrate these silos of information in a meaningful manner.
Rational Requirements Composer gives you the power to capture the requirements from different stakeholders and transforms the spreadsheets, Word documents, presentations, whiteboard discussions, and online conferences to manageable requirements.
You can leverage the rich editors to create use cases, user stories, user interface mock-ups, process diagrams, and many more. The real value comes when you combine different requirement sources from stakeholders through hyperlinks, tags, and attributes.
Very often you have the project management and program management software disconnected from the team, tasks, and development environments. Rational Project Conductor enables you to plan, schedule, and have a work break down structure. You can attach various artifact types when a work item is being created and the project calendar can be fully customized to reflect the team and location.
Rational Project Conductor allows you to schedule work, assign work items, and view timesheets of the team members. It allows you to import the project plan from the Microsoft project.
For the management, measuring of the progress, identifying the potential problems, and development risks could be daunting. Rational Insight gives you the ability to find the blind spots in the development and mitigate the risks. You can enforce the governance in a globally changing environment.
Rational Build Forge is an integrated approach for the automated builds and release management. You can utilize the existing project infrastructures such as scripts, tools, and development languages to achieve the automation and scheduling.