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CLM Beta 2 is available!

This week we made the Release Candidate 0 (RC0) from our three Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) products available as Beta 2 for the release:

When I compare Beta 2 to Beta 1, I get really excited about what all came together for the Beta 2. Let me do some before/after comparison of the CLM integration related features:

  • Unified setup wizard. Before Beta 2 you had to go through more than 20 steps to set up the applications. I carefully marked each step with a pencil to make sure that I did not miss one.  There is now a setup wizard, which discovers the installed applications for you. It guides you through the setup and integration of each application. Here is a video that illustrates the Beta 2 setup.
  • Lifecycle Project Administration (LPA). In Beta 1 you had to go through several additional manual configuration steps before you could leverage the full power of what we called Common Project Administration in Beta 1. In Beta 2 we have renamed Common Project Administration to Lifecycle Project Administration (LPA) and LPA is now fully integrated with the unified setup. There is no more manual configuration is needed.  After going through the set-up wizard you can now immediately create your first Lifecycle project in LPA. In addition, the terminology in LPA and the applications has been aligned with the Jazz Base User model.
  • Money that Matters Sample. In Beta 2 there is now a full blown Money that Matters sample that can easily be created from the Lifecycle Project Administration application. This sample provides a rich set of linked artifacts for each application. The sample is a great way to explore CLM, and even better, there is also a comprehensive tour that guides you through the sample.
  • More traceability linking. In Beta 2 we have completed the new CLM linking support. A defect identified during testing can now be traced back to the test case, the development item (e.g. a Story when using Scrum), and the Requirement. This traceability information is shown to the user in views, queries, and viewlets. See the CLM Beta 2 scenario in the sections “Tracking Development” and “Tracking Requirements” for some examples.  This CLM Beta 2 scenario is what we used ourselves during the RC0 cycle to assess our progress and passing this scenario was one of the “Done” criteria we gave ourselves for Beta 2.
  • Tracking work across applications. For Beta 2 we have added the support to track open issues on requirements using work items. Work items track the state of the requirement’s issue, and there are queries provided in both the Requirements Management (RM) and Change and Configuration Management (CCM) applications to find those requirements that have open tracking items. See the “Collaborating on a Requirement” section of the CLM Beta 2 Scenario for an example.  This illustrates some of the benefits of our evolution toward building products out of integrated applications. Tracking development tasks, tracking progress on test artifacts, or tracking issues with a requirement can now all be done using a shared work item service provided by the CCM application.
  • Common Reporting. For Beta 1 common reporting across the different lifecycle applications was still in progress. For Beta 2 it is now available and you can create reports that trace artifacts across the applications. See the CLM Beta 2 Scenario in the section “Tracking Testing” for a sample report that shows Test Cases impacted by Defects.
  • Synchronized Users. Synchronizing users is the default in Beta 2. The Jazz Team Server is the master for user information and administration. This means you no longer need to create a user in each application; you can create a user in the Jazz Team Server or any of the applications and it is synchronized with the other applications as needed.
  • Licensing. The new, proposed Client Access Licenses (CALs) made their appearance in Beta 2. It is a huge step forward from what we had in 2009 where you had to have a license for each product. The Beta 2 licenses provide you with access across the applications. For example, with a Quality Professional CAL you can manage the Quality Management artifacts and get read access to CCM and RM artifacts.
  • OSLC Version 2.0: For Beta 2 the CLM applications implemented a tech preview of the OSLC version 2 specifications. The linking support mentioned above is now based on the OSLC 2.0 specification which opens up CLM for other applications supporting OSLC.
  • Improved Navigation. In Beta 1 you had to know and enter URLs to navigate across the applications or to the Jazz Team Server administration. In Beta 2 there is an improved Home menu that allows you to navigate across the project areas from the different applications. You are now able to run the CLM Beta 2 Scenario without ever having to enter a URL. The only URL you have to enter is the URL of the unified setup wizard, e.g., “https://myhostname:9443/jts/setup”.
  • Run and Demo CLM from your laptop again. In Beta 1 “Out of Memory” exceptions were a major frustration for me. Thanks to some VM parameter tuning in the startup script,  I’m now a happy camper again. I can do all my testing and demoing from my Windows 7, 32 Bit machine again.

This is RC0 and we still have polishing and defect fixing to do.  One open problem is the reduction of the number of login related gestures that you currently have to do when running in a Single Sign-On setup. It’s still an improvement over the 2.x integration but we expect to do better. Check out the release notes for additional issues.

Finally, the Beta 2 is also an open invitation for your feedback. Please use our forums for questions. Questions specific to a particular point product like RTC or RQM use the corresponding product forums. For questions related to using the products together, like the setup or the integrations, we have recently created a new forum Rational Workbench for CLM for you to use.

If you find defects please open a work item on jazz.net (http://jazz.net/development/). If the defect is found in a point product like RTC or RQM, then file it against the product directly. If the issue is related to the CLM integrations and involves more than one product then please report those against the Jazz Collaborative ALM project. If you are not sure which application is the primary source of the problem then file the defect against “CLM/-Unknown”, otherwise against “CLM/ApplicationName”. These defects will be triaged by the development leads. When you enter the defect, set “How Found” to “Managed Beta”, and “Found In” to “RC0 (Beta 2)”.

Erich Gamma
Collaborative Lifecycle Management technical lead