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

Chapter 1. Beginning with IBM RTC

 

Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings

 
 --Niklaus Wirth

This chapter introduces you to the bird eye view of IBM's Jazz platform and Rational Team Concert (RTC).

First, we will look at some different challenges in modern software development such as technology advances, distributed teams, collaboration, and software processes. These challenges will help us understand the nature of the complexity and set the context for the need of the Jazz platform and Rational Team Concert.

Later part of the chapter gives an introduction to the Jazz platform and Rational Team Concert. Jazz is the software development platform that brings the phases of software development together. The Jazz platform focuses on the collaboration, productivity, and transparency in the team.

Finally, you will be introduced to Rational Team Concert and an overview of various features such as process awareness, team awareness, work items, source control, agile planning, continuous builds, project health, and project administration. We will briefly look at other Jazz-based products and their functionality.

In this chapter, we will look at the following:

  • A discussion on software development challenges

  • Why is Rational Team Concert built on Eclipse?

  • Introduction to Jazz platform and Architecture

  • Bird's eye view of Rational Team Concert

  • An overview of other Jazz-based products