Book Image

IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials

Book Image

IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials

Overview of this book

Software development is a collaborative effort needing active and timely input and response from all its members. Every day, project managers face ever-increasing pressures to produce high-quality software with increasing constraints. With IBM's Rational Team Concert collaborative software delivery environment, you can tremendously improve the productivity of your entire team through a web-based user-interface, continuous builds, a customizable process with work support, team support, integration and many more features. Written by Suresh Krishna and TC Fenstermaker, experts on Rational Team Concert, this book will help you leverage the full potential of the IBM Rational Team Concert platform to improve your individual and team performance. It follows a realistic case-study example enabling you to learn about Rational Team Concert fundamentals and best practices along the way to efficiently manage your software projects and tackle various software development challenges.Beginning with an in-depth analysis of software development challenges, the book goes on to introduce the Jazz Platform followed by a complete overview of the architecture of Rational Team Concert. After you install Rational Team Concert on WebSphere and learn to configure the server and clients, you will see all the features in relation to Web and Eclipse clients.From Chapter 3 onwards a realistic sample application is constructed to give you a strong grasp of your concepts. As you proceed, you learn source control, the mechanism to create, control, and manage documents, artifacts in a software development lifecycle, followed by different tools that Rational Team Concert offers for effective team and work management. You tackle the various challenges of Team Collaboration by integrated e-mail, instant messaging, events, feeds, and work items, the basic units of the task. You also learn the various aspects of the software development process and release planning along with process templates, which provide the initial process and iteration of your project. Finally, you extend the Rational Team Concert and make use of the Jazz Platform APIs to customize your process to fit your organizational needs.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Work Items


Rational Team Concert uses the Work Item as a fundamental mechanism to track, plan, and assign development tasks. On an abstract level, a Work Item is a task. However, this Work Item provides a way to track progress, plan releases, and monitor the project's health. Typically, Work Items are bugs, enhancements, and tasks with varied priorities and are generally attached to a specific release. Rational Team Concert inherently supports the connection between the Work Item and source code. Thus, as a developer, you can go to Work Items from source code and vice-versa.

In the following sections, we will see how to create Work Items and customize them. In this process, we will test our BookManager application as the product owner and report our TODOs as Work Items and later assign them to team members. While creating the Work Items we will explore the various UI elements like My Work View, Dashboards, Queries, Team Central, and more.

Work Items UI

There exists multiple ways to access the...