I’m thrilled to announce the addition of the Design Management project here on Jazz.net. We’re excited to join the community, and we look forward to engaging with you and getting your early feedback!

What is design management?

For the last several years, we’ve talked with customers about the notion of “collaborative architecture management” and how we are enhancing our Jazz collaborative capabilities to support the domains of IT architecture and design and the domains of systems engineering and development. In support of this goal, we’ve held multiple betas of add-on capabilities for IBM Rational Software Architect in the last year and we just recently released our first beta extension for IBM Rational Rhapsody.

The creation of this design management project on Jazz.net is a key milestone in further realizing our goal. This new project will be your focal point for tracking our activity as we build and deliver capabilities to support collaborative design management.

What are we building?

Our initial release of the design management capabilities aims to extend Rational Software Architect (RSA) and Rational Rhapsody to allow you and your teams to search, browse, comment, discuss, and review your designs from both the existing rich clients as well as from a new Web client just for design management. We also plan to include capabilities for linking the design artifacts to other lifecycle artifacts through Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) interfaces and for visualizing those traceability links. In the future, we plan to add support for other design tools, and for standard and custom domains, as well as continue to improve the set of collaboration and management services we provide for these model-centric artifacts.

The initial design management extensions for Rational Software Architect and Rational Rhapsody, plus the new design management server, are now available for download.

Browsing models and commenting in Design Management Web UI

How can you participate?

Through our Design Management project page you can access our release plan and dashboard where you’ll be able to track our progress and submit bugs and suggest enhancements. You also have direct access to our development team and the rest of the community members through our forum, where you can ask and answer questions.

And, of course, we would love for you to download and try our milestones so you can give us feedback to make it better!

On behalf of the entire Design Management team, we welcome you to the project, we hope you’ll download our initial builds and give them a try, and we look forward to collaborating on strengthening the role of architecture and design in the software and systems delivery lifecycle.

Daniel Leroux
IBM Distinguished Engineer – Rational Architecture and Design Management