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 6. Development Process and Release Planning

 

A program is never less than 90% complete, and never more than 95% complete.

 
 --Terry Baker

A modern software development project is difficult to imagine without some form of development process. A software development process, simple or complex, comprises a set of rules, recommendations, standards, tools, and of course, people. Software release planning is very much an integral part of the development process and deals with how tasks are grouped, how releases are planned, and ways to track the release progress. Remember that tracking tasks is not the same as tracking releases.

In this chapter, we will explore various aspects of the software development process and release planning and management:

  • For the software development process, we will be introduced to the software process templates, configuring the templates, and team roles

  • From the Release Planning, we will get introduced to an overview of iterations, sprints, backlogs, and tracking...