Even though this was a pretty quick development cycle, the CLM 4.0.1 release has something new for everyone on the team. We’ve been busy improving all of the tools, and are happy to announce the general availability of the 4.0.1 release of Rational’s Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management, including the 4.0.1 releases of Rational Team Concert, Rational Requirements Composer, and Rational Quality Manager.
For the Development team:
- The whole team will benefit from improved performance in the Planning tools. Large plans load 25% faster in RTC 4.0.1 than in RTC 4.0. If you upgrade to a modern browser like IE9, Chrome, Firefox 10+, or Safari at the same time, the improvements are dramatic.
- RTC Visual Studio users can move up to Visual Studio 2012 with our new support for that release.
- Developers can more easily review the changes made in a set of change sets.
- IBM Enterprise Platform customers will benefit from several improvements such as built result management in the ISPF client and the ability to use output names that are different from the input names for a translator.
For Business Analysts:
- We’ve introduced a new concept called modules in this release. Modules are a powerful new feature that allow users to more easily create, manage and trace requirements organized within specifications. Modules support ordering and organizing requirements into hierarchies for easy understanding, and also support extensive filtering and display customization for detailed requirements analysis.
- Users can now customize traceability columns to display attributes at the on the target side of a link. This allows users to see more information at a glance in a single view.
- Analysts can now rely on locking to prevent collisions while working on shared requirements artifacts. The tool will automatically lock /release artifacts as they are being edited to prevent users from conflicting with or overriding each other as they collaborate on requirements.
- Business stakeholders can now easily compare collections of requirements, to assess requirements changes over time, for example. Comparison of versions of collections as well as comparison of one collection to another are supported. This will allow users to better understand the differences between their requirement releases, projects or work efforts.
For the Quality team:
- Quality Manager now supports richer capabilities for customer that work in regulated environments. This includes capabilities such as the ability to require entry of test results, auto-locking of test artifacts once approved, automatic state transitions during the approval process, and forcing new approvals for re-review of artifacts.
- Tester productivity is improved through a set of user interface and usability enhancements. This includes being able to directly capture screen images during a manual test, the ability to filter test case views by additional fields such as test plan, cell editing in table views, filtering execution records by test case categories, and the ability to copy execution records to new iterations.
- Users can see more of the lifecycle information related to their tests. They can show requirements coverage in the test plan, display backlink status in traceability views and use an improved requirement reconciliation wizard to synch tests with requirements.
- Testers will find it easier to manage test data with the ability to select sub-sets of test data during both test script authoring and execution, and categories on test data to allow better organization of test data.
For Designers:
- The Design Manager team has also shipped an updated version which integrates with CLM 4.0.1.
- This includes the capabilities of their 4.0 release in September along with a set of fixes and some substantial work on improving the performance of the tool.
We haven’t forgotten the tool owners and deployment managers. In CLM 4.0.1, we’re declaring support for renaming servers in production, adding to the existing pilot-to-production and production-to-pilot scenarios. The biggest challenge there was testing and documenting the behavior of integrated tools after a server rename. You can find updated instructions covering the non-CLM tools which support server rename as well as the instructions for updating or configuring them. We also enhanced the tools to support a read-only verification window after a rename, so that administrators can sanity check a rename before re-opening the server for business.
As I said, this was a pretty short development cycle, but we’ve been working hard on our tools and practices to go even more rapidly in the future. We’ve evolved our ways of planning and delivering Plan Items, established a Continuous Delivery Pipeline using the Smart Cloud Continuous Delivery capability, and improved our automated testing. Look for further blogs discussing those efforts soon.
Scott Rich, Distinguished Engineer
IBM Rational Technical Lead for CLM
scott_rich@ch.ibm.com
Oncloudone.net is doing its first customer 4.0.1 upgrade tonight! We’re looking forward to checking out the new features! I’m very excited to check out the “read-only verification window” feature. Is it possible to do a “maintenance mode” feature where database work can be performed while the application server is still running? That would be very helpful when applying hotfixes, upgrades, and other routine maintenance without having to show the end users a 404 page. We’re also excited to hear about the DM performance improvements! Has official browser support for Chrome and Firefox 16 been introduced? Keep up the great work!
Well done to the dev team for hitting their planned release date on the button yet again. Just installed on Tomcat/Derby using the express install and setup on Windows7 Professional (as a test system) . Used Chrome as the browser for the setup, and it all looks good. Used the web installer this morning and download performance was good. I did get the download started before I told anyone else :-) (I suspect the download servers are going to get very busy).
Scott will discuss CLM 4.0.1 details, Friday Nov. 30th from 11 – noon EST during ALM Office Hours Event. To register follow link https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/Fariz/entry/latest_news_on_the_ibm_rational_solution_for_collaborative_lifecycle_management1?lang=en
Don’t forget to read the https://jazz.net/downloads/design-management/releases/4.0.1?p=news page for more details on DM 4.0.1 content and integration with CLM 4.0.1
Man Am I glad we delayed the upgrade to 4.0.0.1 , Now we could jump in to 4.0.1 after testing it.
Excellent. Some of the customer concerns about the IE-9 where the performance is not so good as compare with Firefox. I hope 4.0.1 would able to resolve the this issue as well. I will test this in next 1 week.
Thanks for the great comments everyone.
@ben, interesting thought about other applications for read-only mode, could you submit an enhancement request for that and subscribe me? re: Chrome and Firefox, see https://jazz.net/library/article/1109 for the updated browser support. Full support for Safari, Chrome, and FF. Of course, it’s tricky to mail down the exact versions for those guys.
@manoj, take a look at what we’re measuring for performance across the browsers now: https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/Jazz_wan_perf_40 It’s getting pretty close across the big three.
Congratulation Scott and team,
I was able to upgrade my first system to 4.0.1 today within 6 hours. I recognized no real problem during upgrade nor during my first sanity checks.
The performace within RTC looks promising. The new features in RRC like collection compair and module support are exact what we need.
Of course, you know me, I’m looking forward for 4.0.2 and 5.0! With the features discussed at Innovate, we would make the next big step forward.
Hope to meet you soon in Zurich downtown for a beer.
cheers
Guido
If you missed to listen to Scott Rich talking about CLM 4.0.1, you can find his slides and recording at https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/Fariz/entry/latest_news_on_the_ibm_rational_solution_for_collaborative_lifecycle_management1?lang=en.
I also recommend to check out and became a member of DeveloperWorks ALM Community at http://bit.ly/IBMALM.
Scott, have a question reguarding CCM. Is there a mechanism in CCM to track defects that have beed reopened? We are currently doing this while triaging defects manually. It would be great to be able to see a list of defects for a life cycle project that have been repoened. Thanks and look forward to any info you can provide.
Hi Homer, if I understand your question, it’s very straightforward. In the default workflow, defects which are re-opened go into a Reopened state, so you can easily query for those and display those query results in Eclipse, the Web UI, or on a dashboard. Let me know if I didn’t get the question right. or if there’s more detail you need.
I am trying to install RTC 4.0.1 on SLES 11.2 and get the following error message from the Installation Manager 1.6.1.
Problems occurred when invoking code from plug-in: “org.eclipse.jface”.
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Argument not valid The element type “exec” must be terminated by the matching end-tag “</exec>”.
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Argument not valid The element type “exec” must be terminated by the matching end-tag “</exec>”.
Any clues what to do to resolve this? I am in the process of downloading the package again, but never had issues before.