We are trying hard to do something different with open commercial development at Jazz.net. Besides being able to directly interact with the development team in the forums and work items, the other important transparency goal is to share with you our plans and schedules. Let me take you on a tour of the Rational Team Concert 2.0 plan:

Schedule and Milestones

The schedule for Rational Team Concert 2.0 is a good starting point for tracking 2.0 work. A milestone build is available on Jazz.net every month, and the release schedule is split into monthly iterations. We upgrade our self-hosting server every milestone and post the builds on jazz.net.  If there is a new feature you are waiting for, you can download a milestone build and try it out before we ship. If you don’t want to be on the bleeding edge, we promote blessed milestone builds to betas as well once or twice a release.

Note: In 2.0 we have upgraded our repository schema. We don’t recommend you use a regular 2.0 build for production until we reach beta level since you’ll have to run a repository migration. You can however, download and try out the new features on test data.

The milestone schedule for Rational Team Concert 2.0 is the following:

• Fri. Nov. 21, 2008 – M1D1 – Mid-milestone build
• Fri. Dec. 19, 2008 – M1 – Milestone 1 build
• Fri. Jan. 30, 2009 – M2D1 – Mid-milestone build
• Fri. Feb. 27, 2009 – M2 – Milestone 2 build – basis for Beta 1
• Fri. Mar. 27, 2009 – M3D1 – Mid-milestone build – API, storage model, and migration handler freeze
• Fri. Apr. 24, 2009 – M3 – Milestone 3 build – basis for Beta 2 – feature complete – UI and development freeze – lock down and testing begins
• End-game: May/June

What we are working on

Our release plan is very much like a big Scrum backlog (it’s rather big, so expect it to take 30 seconds to load). The backlog is tracked in a plan assigned to the 2.0 release, you can find it directly from the Jazz.net web under the “Iteration Planning” page.  As you can see, we sort product requirements into an ordered list based on user feedback and schedule constraints.

Rational Team Concert 2.0 Release Backlog

We are heavy users of the Rational Team Concert planning and work item customization and have created new work items types and custom fields. At the planning level these are used to evaluate the scope and theme of a plan item and some internal codes for our product tracking. Having a new work item type also allows us to control permissions and workflows, as an example, only PMC (project management committee) members can resolve a plan item.

Customized Work Item – A Plan Item

Each component team has their own smaller work items, but anything which spans teams is tracked in the release plan. The release plan is split into two parts: the verbose html document that describes the objectives in a bit more detail, and the actual backlog. Each plan item is decomposed into a subset of tasks; these tasks provide a good overview of the actual work happening to implement the plan item.

Each of the backlog items is given a state of “new”, “proposed”, or “committed”, which, as you can guess, categorizes the importance of the items for the release. In addition, each item is being tracked with a “not started”, “started”, “behind”, or “at risk” state to track the overall progress. The RTC Development dashboard has a handy overview of the top level plan items grouped into these states. The filled green arrows indicate “committed” plan items and the others are “new” or “proposed”.

Rational Team Concert 2.0 Plan Item Progress Dashboard

The plan items are “owned” by a PMC member but the individual tasks are assigned to each component team. We assess a plan items’ status at the end of each iteration. To simplify the tracking of the update we use a tracking work item with an approval from each component lead to indicate that they’ve reviewed and updated their plan items and tasks to reflect their current status.

This should help you get a good overview of what is happening in Rational Team Concert 2.0, and don’t hesitate to open new work items, comment on existing ones, or just check out our dashboards to track our progress.

Jean-Michel Lemieux
Team Concert PMC
Jazz Source Control Lead