Even though this was a pretty quick development cycle, the CLM 4.0.1 release has something new for everyone on the team.  We’ve been busy improving all of the tools, and are happy to announce the general availability of the 4.0.1 release of Rational’s Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management, including the 4.0.1 releases of Rational Team Concert, Rational Requirements Composer, and Rational Quality Manager.

For the Development team:

• The whole team will benefit from improved performance in the Planning tools.  Large plans load 25% faster in RTC 4.0.1 than in RTC 4.0.  If you upgrade to a modern browser like IE9, Chrome, Firefox 10+, or Safari at the same time, the improvements are dramatic.
• RTC Visual Studio users can move up to Visual Studio 2012 with our new support for that release.
• Developers can more easily review the changes made in a set of change sets.
• IBM Enterprise Platform customers will benefit from several improvements such as built result management in the ISPF client and the ability to use output names that are different from the input names for a translator.

For Business Analysts:

• We’ve introduced a new concept called modules in this release.  Modules are a powerful new feature that allow users to more easily create, manage and trace requirements organized within specifications.  Modules support ordering and organizing requirements into hierarchies for easy understanding, and also support extensive filtering and display customization for detailed requirements analysis.
• Users can now customize traceability columns to display attributes at the on the target side of a link.  This allows users to see more information at a glance in a single view.
• Analysts can now rely on locking to prevent collisions while working on shared requirements artifacts.  The tool will automatically lock /release artifacts as they are being edited to prevent users from conflicting with or overriding each other as they collaborate on requirements.
• Business stakeholders can now easily compare collections of requirements, to assess requirements changes over time, for example.  Comparison of versions of collections as well as comparison of one collection to another are supported.  This will allow users to better understand the differences between their requirement releases, projects or work efforts.

For the Quality team:

• Quality Manager now supports richer capabilities for customer that work in regulated environments. This includes capabilities such as the ability to require entry of test results, auto-locking of test artifacts once approved, automatic state transitions during the approval process, and forcing new approvals for re-review of artifacts.
• Tester productivity is improved through a set of user interface and usability enhancements. This includes being able to directly capture screen images during a manual test, the ability to filter test case views by additional fields such as test plan, cell editing in table views, filtering execution records by test case categories, and the ability to copy execution records to new iterations.
• Users can see more of the lifecycle information related to their tests.  They can show requirements coverage in the test plan, display backlink status in traceability views and use an improved requirement reconciliation wizard to synch tests with requirements.
• Testers will find it easier to manage test data with the ability to select sub-sets of test data during both test script authoring and execution, and categories on test data to allow better organization of test data.

For Designers:

• The Design Manager team has also shipped an updated version which integrates with CLM 4.0.1.
• This includes the capabilities of their 4.0 release in September along with a set of fixes and some substantial work on improving the performance of the tool.

We haven’t forgotten the tool owners and deployment managers.  In CLM 4.0.1, we’re declaring support for renaming servers in production, adding to the existing pilot-to-production and production-to-pilot scenarios.  The biggest challenge there was testing and documenting the behavior of integrated tools after a server rename.  You can find updated instructions covering the non-CLM tools which support server rename as well as the instructions  for updating or configuring them. We also enhanced the tools to support a read-only verification window after a rename, so that administrators can sanity check a rename before re-opening the server for business.

As I said, this was a pretty short development cycle, but we’ve been working hard on our tools and practices to go even more rapidly in the future.  We’ve evolved our ways of planning and delivering Plan Items, established a Continuous Delivery Pipeline using the Smart Cloud Continuous Delivery capability, and improved our automated testing.  Look for further blogs discussing those efforts soon.

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