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Announcing the CLM 2012 Beta!

Very few companies provide milestone builds of their products to their customers. And not all provide betas. But how many companies do both AND self-host on their milestones and betas? Not many, but we DO and we’re proud of it. By self-hosting, we work out the problems before you experience them, but we also know that our self-hosting model can’t find everything.

That’s why we’re bursting at the seams to announce the availability our 2012 beta release of the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management. This solution provides the best integrated experience for software development teams available on the market or through open source. In a single download [EDIT: March 19 – RC0a now available as latest beta download] you can manage requirements, release and iteration plans, source code, builds, and testing artifacts, while tracking progress using dashboards filled with trends, graphs and queries.

The integrations are so seamless you wouldn’t know that you were also using the simultaneous beta releases of three products if we didn’t tell you – Rational Team Concert, Rational Requirements Composer, and Rational Quality Manager.

In these betas you will find a range of new features: some that span the solution by being common to all users, and some that are specific to the role you play. Some of the new features include:

For all team members:

  • New Express set up wizard (added in M7) – talk about easy!
  • Support for clustering – provide High Availability for your CLM apps by deploying them into a WebSphere cluster.
  • Server rename – need to move your server?  Going from Test to Production?  Renaming a production server is not for the faint of heart, but sometimes you just have to do it.  Now you can.

For analysts:

  • Suspect links on requirements – You can now discover changes across requirements traceability links and other lifecycle elements using suspect links.
  • Modules will let you structure, order and create requirements specifications. If you’ve used modules in DOORS we’d love your feedback on this new web implementation.
  • Graphical traceability Explorer (in 3.5M3) – Graphically analyze and dive deep into understanding your traceability relationships and lifecycle link dependencies.
  • Project Archive (in 4.0 M5) – Export and import your project Archive files containing your requirements that can be used in other requirements environments.
  • Requirement Parsing (in 4.0 M7)– Automatically identify and separate your requirements using keyword or structure.
  • Increased write access control – control the Writable changes that team members can make by: folder, artifact type, attribute and role.
  • See the Beta New & Noteworthy for a full list with descriptions

For developers:

For testers and quality professionals:

  • Traceability and live views – Real-time test construction and execution status through dashboard viewlets, test case, execution record & result tables, and widgets in test plans.
  • Improved Test Planning – Project templates are now available to quickly setup new QM projects. Track and manage priorities and time estimates thanks to new test case attributes and views. Improved support for formal review.
  • Test Construction – Assisted Manual Testing leveraging IBM Rational Functional Tester recording capability. Updates to CSV export and E-Signature.
  • Requirements integration improvements include the ability to associate a requirement to a test script step, hide requirement risk information, reconcile requirements using a new wizard, group Rational RequisitePro views and packages by server and project.
  • Reporting – Usability improvements related to parameters, presentation, description, and report management. Also adds 14 new out-of-the-box reports including Test Suite status reports. Support for Rational Publishing Engine and Rational Reporting Document Generation.
  • Integrations – Enhanced integration to DOORS 9.4 using OSLC v2.
  • See the Beta New & Noteworthy for a full list with descriptions

To get started you can use the famous “Money that Matters” scenario or any one of the role-centric, beta-specific task guides designed to help you explore the new features:  developersanalysts, and quality professionals.  You may notice that link goes to a different place than the 2011 scenario which was published in our wiki.  For 2012, we’re using Requirements Composer to evolve the scenario, and we’ve made that available to the Community.  We invite you to comment there and engage the development team in discussion of the 2012 scenario.

Let us know how it’s going. The forums are “open”, and our friendly development team is ready to answer your questions and help you try out the beta. Here’s a quick reference:

If you find defects or have enhancement requests, the guidance is similar, so here are the links:

We hope you like what we’re up to  as much as we do, and look forward to collaborating with you in the forums!

Scott Rich
IBM Distinguished Engineer, CLM Technical Lead