Whew!  What a couple of months.  In June we wrapped up development of the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) 2011, had a great time at Innovate – our yearly Rational Conference – in Orlando, pushed the button on the final bits while in Orlando to send them to manufacturing, and celebrated that by closing down the bar in the Dolphin hotel.  When we got back we performed our final checks to ensure we had successfully GA’ed (made generally available) CLM 2011, comprising the 3.0.1 releases of RTC, RQM, and RRC. And finally, on June 29, we confirmed the final piece, our CLM 2011 deliverable for the big iron, zOS.

Anyway, we had a great opportunity while in Orlando and while this current release was fresh on our minds, to begin thinking about and planning for what’s next.  With input from our customers, we decided we like a yearly cadence for major releases. So current thinking is the next major release will be in 2Q12, and we’ll call it CLM 2012.  We also concluded that we wanted quarterly service updates, or as close as we can get to that.  Our thinking is service updates in 3Q11, 4Q11, and 1Q12, plus or minus a month.  We’ll call these respectively, CLM 2011 FP1, CLM2011 FP2, and CLM 2011 FP3.

For the service updates, you’ll see dashboards with the work items we are thinking of addressing in the upcoming fix packs.  We’re currently working on plans for FP1.  On the dashboard, you can see the defects and a modest set of functional enhancements we’re considering for FP1.  The enhancements are “Proposed” while we’re investigating, and then either “Committed” or “Deferred”.  Committed means it’s our intent to deliver the enhancement as part of the fix pack.  “Deferred” means we’ve considered it, but decided not to include the enhancement.  On the dashboard, you can also see the status of our planning efforts.  While we’re working the plan, the status is “Open”.  You can see this in the title of the dashboard tab. Once we’ve closed on the content we intend to include, we’ll change the status to “Closed”.   Currently, we expect to close this plan in August.  If you’d like to provide input on the service updates, use the respective work items:

• Discuss CLM 2011 FP1 plan (173164)
• Discuss CLM 2011 FP2 plan (173165)

Now, let’s talk about what you can expect for CLM 2012.  Our planning in Orlando was pretty intense.  We went down two days early and had all of our technical leadership sequestered for two days.  We agreed on a set of high level themes to guide our planning.

1. Ensure CLM 2011 is successful. Work and cycles to assure the success of customers deploying what we delivered in June.
2. Enterprise deployment, scalability, reliability. Work to improve CLM in large, more complex configurations, including data reorganization on servers, clustering, and high availability.
3. Systems and Embedded. A targeted focus to improve CLM for customers doing systems and embedded development.
4. Awareness and Engagement. Work in and around Jazz.net to make it easier to engage and overall to improve community interaction.
5. Consumability/Time-to-Value. Make it easier to get up and running, more quickly, with CLM
6. Reduce technical debt. While not necessarily something we can sell, this is work we know we need to do to make CLM more maintainable.

We then used these themes to sketch out an initial plan for CLM 2012 starting with our backlog of work items.  We are currently in the process of refining that work.  You will see the results of our planning work on the Planning 2012 tab of the Jazz Collaborative ALM dashboard. The “CLM 2012” viewlet shows broad and cross-cutting plan items.   The application viewlets for CCM, JAF – formerly JTS, QM, and RM, show domain specific plan items.  Plan items link to other, application-specific, more detailed plan items.  Initially, plan items are “Proposed”.    As much as we’d like to be able to address all of the stuff in our backlog, software physics prevents that.  Items we don’t get to in our CLM 2012 plans will remain in our backlog.  You can see the respective backlogs on the Planning – Backlogs tab.

As we work our plan for what we intend to deliver in CLM 2012, we’ll reflect that in the status of the plan items in the CLM 2012 plans.  To wit, plan items we feel confident of delivering with CLM 2012 are “Committed”. Things we decide will not make the release are “Deferred”.  Some  plan items will continue to be “Proposed”.  This is because we need to do more analysis before we decide whether or not we’ll be able to deliver the plan items or if we need to defer them.  Items which are “Proposed” will have an associated exploration period.  At the end of that exploration, we will either commit or defer the item.  Our goal is, by the end of 3Q, to specify our initial CLM 2012 plan.  We’ll continue to refine that plan over the next quarter or two, refining the remaining plan items to be either “Committed” or “Deferred”.  Like with our service update planning, our CLM 2012 plans have an overall status.  While we’re working on the plan, the plan status will be “Open”, shown on the dashboard tab.  When we have a consensus, we’ll indicate this by marking the plan “Closed”.  Currently, we project to close our CLM 2012 plan by September.

To stay abreast of our planning activities and status, watch the Planning 2012 tab of the Jazz Collaborative ALM dashboard. Please feel free to comment on the plan items themselves, or the related, more detailed, work items.   If you’d like to provide input or weigh in on general plan discussions, we have a work item for this, Discuss CLM 2012 plan (173163).

It’s been an intense, exhausting, but ultimately rewarding several quarters leading up to the successful release of CLM 2011.  We’re excited with its potential.  We look forward to working with you to make it and you successful and are keen for your input on our CLM 2012 plans.

Thanks,

Scott Rich
IBM Distinguished Engineer, CLM Technical Lead

John Kellerman
Sr. Development Manager, Jazz and Eclipse