Rational Team Concert for System z Features

Rational Team Concert for System z includes all the features of Rational Team Concert for the collaborative development environment and the development of distributed applications.

Work items are the fundamental mechanism in Rational Team Concert for System z to track and coordinate development tasks and workflows, all governed by your team's associated process. Rational Team Concert for System z has enhanced work-item support to allow linking within the work items to z/OS artifacts. This direct linking allows users to access files on z/OS. This function is provided in combination with Rational Developer for System z V7.6. Along with this ability to link from a work item, users can also link from source to work items.

In addition, Rational team Concert for System z provides a new Jazz Gateway that provides a simple way for users of existing host-based SCMs to query the status of a work item. This provides the capability to control an existing host-based SCM using the work item functions within Rational Team Concert for System z. This provides companies the ability to bring together distributed teams and z/OS teams into a single project planning and tracking environment without having to move the SCM or build capabilities for the developers.

The Source Control component of Rational Team Concert has been expanded to support z/OS artifacts directly. This support is provided through a new Eclipse project type called "zComponent Projects" that allow users to define the additional attributes required, such as the PDS name and the language type. Rational Team Concert for System z also has a new File Agent that runs on z/OS and works with the SCM command line to extract source directly into data sets on z/OS. This additional support facilitates integration with Rational Developer for System z and the new build support for z/OS builds.

A new Scrum template is provided to support the use of Agile Planning for z/OS-based teams. This template has been modified with the additional role required for build definition, as well as additional process controls, and the standard promotion hierarchy generally defined for host projects source control. This modified template can be used as a base for additional customizations for projects doing host-based development.

A new set of build agents, called the Rational Build Agent (based on the Rational Build Forge agents), have been integrated into the team server. The z/OS build agent has been integrated into the job monitor function to allow for submission and monitoring of JCL-based builds. In addition, a new function, called Ant with z/OS extensions, based on the Apache Ant function has been added. Ant with z/OS extensions adds additional z/OS-specific functions to Ant to support builds for z/OS artifacts.

Rational Team Concert for System z integrates with Rational Developer for System z to provide full support for the z/OS developer. The integration allows Rational Developer for System z users to select artifacts from the Rational Team Concert for System z SCM for use within Rational Developer for System z subprojects. In addition, Rational Team Concert for System z provides the ability to park, suspend, or allow take over by another user, for a debug session of Rational Developer for System z and IBM Debug Tool.