I’m very pleased to announce the release of IBM Rational Activity Tracking 0.5, the first Rational Insight incubator and the first Insight project developed in collaboration with IBM Research. But just what is IBM Rational Activity Tracking? To illustrate, let’s look at an example.

With today’s globally integrated work force, it is common for software developers to work on multiple projects in parallel. Lawrence is a developer assigned to work on two projects: Project A and Project B. While Lawrence’s time may be split equally on the two projects, it may also be split down another line such as 70% on Project A and 30% on Project B. Once Lawrence starts working on the projects, do his activities indicate that he is working on the projects to which he has been assigned? In what proportion is he working on Project A compared to Project B? How can you measure Lawrence’s activities?

The example above illustrates one usage of developer activity tracking at the individual developer level. At the project or program level it is useful to understand in aggregate the activities in which the development teams are involved. What are the activities in which the development teams are most active? Coding? Writing documentation? Answering questions on the forums? Speaking via the mailing list and instant messaging? This type of information can be very useful when assessing project performance and making future staffing decisions.

The IBM Rational Activity Tracking incubator aims to help answer questions about developer activity by gathering information on developer interaction with the development systems that they use on a day to day basis. This information is then presented in reports in the Rational Insight Report Server. The initial incubator release supports change and configuration management (CCM) data from Rational Team Concert (RTC). Activity Tracking extracts CCM resources like change sets, file versions, and associated work items and users from RTC. It analyzes this information and computes metrics that drive the reports.

The incubator package consists of a getting started guide, data service adapter, data warehouse schema updates, data manager ETL job and XDC file, framework manager model, and reports. There is also sample data so that you can explore the package before connecting up to your own RTC instance.

Get started with the IBM Rational Activity Tracking 0.5 incubator today:

• Download Activity Tracking  from the Rational Insight 1.0.0.2 download page. Activity Tracking is based on the Rational Insight 1.0.0.2 release and the initial release has been tested on Windows with DB2.
• Read the Activity Tracking Quick Start Guide.
• Review the Activity Tracking Installation Guide.

Lawrence Mandel
Release Manager, Rational Insight