So things have been a little quiet here on jazz.net for the CLM team since Innovate. We took some time to recover from shipping CLM 2012 and Innovate, but we’ve also been busy working on plans for our next CLM release, digesting the input from our Product Managers and also your input from the Plan Jam. At the same time, we’ve started a pretty ambitious project to change the way we work with an end goal of achieving a much faster delivery cycle. We’re embracing the ideas of Continuous Delivery, and applying them to the way we plan, build, and ship CLM. For starters, the current development plans for this next release wrap up before the end of the year, rather than next June.

We’ve continued working on and testing some of the more complex features of CLM 2012 with a goal of removing some of the restrictions they shipped with. We’ve done performance and platform work on clustering, and should be publishing those results soon. Based on these positive results, we’re also self-hosting jazz.net on a cluster again, which was always one of our goals to gain confidence. Similarly, we’re pushing ahead with server rename, working on verification tools, and testing and documenting the interactions of server rename with non-CLM tool integrations. This past week, we were able to use server rename to update the data in our staging test server, “bluesdev”, for the first time in over two years! You can track progress on these items in the Plan Items: 212982: Solidify Clustering for high-availability and 213009: Support server rename for production-to-production deployments.

Two parts of the CLM team are still heads down on their major releases: Design Manager and DOORS Next Generation. Hopefully you’ve been tracking their Beta releases lately. Once they ship and catch their breath, we’ll be merging them back into the CLM mainstream.

I mentioned at the start that we were starting to adopt practices from Continuous Delivery. We’ve got four Feature Teams working on different aspects, and you can expect to hear more about how we’re changing our ways of working, and taking advantage of the IBM SmartCloud Continuous Delivery solution over the next few months. Right now, we’re taking the opportunity to pick off some of the top priority customer features from the product backlogs to practice these new ways of working. I’ll let the product teams talk about the items they’re focusing on in subsequent posts.

One of the bigger challenges we’re working on in our move towards Continuous Delivery is how to also keep some focus on a long-term vision and make progress on those “big ticket” items that can’t be delivered in a sprint or two. We’re working with our Product Managers and Designers to get the exploration and design work for some of those into the timeline before the end of the year as well. If we can get our Continuous Delivery practices working for us, we hope to have a more painless endgame and be able to start looking forward much sooner than usual.

Once we get our Continuous Delivery practices working, we expect to be able to deliver features more incrementally and faster, while maintaining or improving stability.

Scott Rich, Distinguished Engineer
IBM Rational Technical Lead for CLM
scott_rich@ch.ibm.com