The recently released IBM Rational Build Forge 7.1 has added support for integration between Rational Team Concert and Rational Build Forge. By combining the powerful software assembly automation of Rational Build Forge with the collaborative, agile environment of Rational Team Concert your software development teams can now easily:
- Manage software assembly for Jazz and traditional environments simultaneously
- Accelerate process execution with simultaneous execution on multiple platforms
- Handle even the most complex toolset without scripting
- Ensure compliance mandates with sophisticated logging for governance and traceability
When developers launch build requests from Rational Team Concert, corresponding Rational Build Forge jobs are started. Once the build is completed, the results are available directly in Rational Team Concert, or via bi-directional links that makes data available from both products. Through this tight integration, your Rational Team Concert users have an in-shell Rational Build Forge experience.
The integration provides automatic linkage between the Build Forge build and Rational Team Concert. In addition, the Rational Team Concert Build Toolkit can be used from Build Forge steps to publish more detailed information about your build’s progress or result data. Documentation for the toolkit can be found here: https://jazz.net/jazzdocs/topic/com.ibm.team.build.doc/topics/cantbuildtoolkit.html
The build definition creation wizard has been augmented to include a template for defining a Rational Build Forge build:
The build definition editor has been augmented to include a new property sheet for configuring the Rational Build Forge connection information and project:
The build results now include a link to the Build Forge job results:
See the IBM Rational Build Forge 7.1 Installation Guide for further details on installing and configuring the integration.
To learn more, visit the IBM Rational Build Forge page on ibm.com.
I played with the integration a little and I found that it has a couple of problems. First I had to give “Everyone” rights to control the build lifecycle, request builds, and save build results. May be I am wrong but I couldn’t find the way to assign a user on the build engine side. Second ( the biggest one ) since the build definition has no knowledge of source code control there is no connection between the build and source code changes. Sure we can use and adapter and create BOM on the BuildForge side, but there is no connection between Workitem/ChangeSet and the build on the RTC side. Bottom line for me – I cant use it
Correction to my own statement. You can publish more details about your builds via Rational Team Concert Build Toolkit but the first issue is still show stopper for me.
Here are a couple of artilces on the current state of the RTC/Build Forge integration. The Permission issue mentioned above is fixed in the downloadable server-side plugin attached in the second article. The official delivery for the permissions fix will be in Build Forge 7.1.1.4.
*Configuring Build Forge to Integrate with RTC Team Build*
https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/RationalBuildForge/IntegrationWithRTC
*Advanced Build Forge Integration with RTC: Continuous Integration and Using Build Toolkit Ant Tasks for Richer Build Result Contributions*
https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Main/RationalBuildForge/CallingBuildToolkitAntTasksFromBuildForgeToFeedContributions