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

Features overview


The following is an overview of enhancements in the Rational Team Concert 3.0:

  • General features:

    • Enterprise process projects: This adds the ability to share processes between a set of projects on the same server.

    • New process pre-conditions: A lot of new pre-conditions help teams better control how they work. This includes support for enforcing that all change sets be accepted before delivering, parent work items can't be closed until all children are closed, and work item state-based required properties.

    • Navigation: The Web UI is redesigned to improve navigation and ease of use. The navigation bar is replaced with the mini dashboard, and has additional features such as global search, common filtering to find artifacts, a home menu, and component menus.

    • SmartCard and SSL certificates: Support is added in the Eclipse, build, web, and command line clients to allow users to authenticate with SmartCard and SSL certificates.

  • Packaging and licencing:

    • Packaging and platform support is simplified in 3.0. There is only one product that supports all our platforms. Instead of the model in 2.X with separate products and servers for these platforms (RTC, RTC for System Z, RTC for Power), they have been merged.

    • As an administrator, the first thing you'll notice is that there are now two applications running on your server—the CCM (Change and Configuration Management) and the JTS (Jazz Team Server).

    • As new applications are available, you will be able to install licenses into the same JTS and share users and licenses across the applications. This will be useful because new versions of RQM and RRC are upgraded as part of the CLM initiative.

  • Administration:

    • LDAP configuration setup page improvements: Validation and creation of server and web XML files for Tomcat.

    • Shared Jazz team server configuration: Users and licenses can be shared between a set of applications and assigned and tracked centrally.

  • Planning:

    • Traditional planning: More support is added for more traditional planning activities and processes. This includes resource allocations, work dependencies, and risk management.

    • Roadmaps: Added ability to see timeline and work dependencies in all plan modes.

    • Planning usability: Plans have enhancements such as column headers, ability to resize columns, incremental loading, easier plan mode creation and filtering, and a completely new agile task board.

  • Work items:

    • Work item customization in the Web: Work item customization is added for the Web. This includes a web-based wysiwyg presentation editor.

    • Embedded work items: Other products such as Rational Quality Manager can embed work items into their Web UIs even though they may be stored in another application.

  • Source control:

    • Distributed source control: It's now possible to create repository workspaces, deliver, and accept across servers. Change sets can be linked to work items in other repositories and any other OSLC-CM providers.

    • Versioned properties: Properties can now be added to version-controlled resources that are versioned with the resources.

  • Builds:

    • Out of the box BuildForge integration: The integration is now included in Team Concert and includes many improvements such as the availability of using BuildForge agents and running jbe tasks directly from BuildForge.

    • Configurable build engine types: Build engine types have been introduced to support having different tasks run on different environments with custom configuration options.