When you look at your project requirements and use cases today, how much do you rely on pictures or diagrams? When a project team is documenting ideas for their next development iteration people often draft diagrams to show the flow, user interaction through use cases, or even user interface mock ups to show what the feature or tool might look like. Rational Requirements Composer (RRC) has been uniquely positioned in the market to support many of these visual methods for project requirements. Even in agile teams where developers constitute the bulk of the development user community, RRC has been selected to help developers further describe what a work item will do and augment their ideas with a sketch or a diagram. If you are not using visual methods today in your development I recommend you consider how it could benefit your current development. As they say, “A picture is worth a thousand words!”
Since the release of RRC 3.0.1 in June of 2011, the visual editors provided in the new RRC web client were merely plug-in editors based on the original Eclipse technology used in RRC versions 1.x and 2.x. Our intention since the 3.0.1 release has been to continue to improve these editors for a better Web experience in requirements definition. Over the past two years, however, it has become increasingly obvious that the plug-in technology will always be fraught with limitations and usability constraints. During this same time period, newer web technologies, including HTML 5, have continued to improve to a level sufficient that a rich visual editing experience can now be achieved.
The RRC development team remain committed as ever to visual requirements definition features, and we have now begun to explore the new HTML 5 technology in the hopes of replacing our plug-in editors as development time allows. With the release of RRC 4.0.3 in June, we are now also offering our first redesigned and redeveloped visual editors based on the User Interface editor currently found in RRC. This editor is being published as an Incubator/Beta through jazz.net in the hopes that customers like you will continue to support our open development efforts, download the incubator, set it up on a trial server, and try it out in order to give us feedback. It is not part of the RRC 4.0.3 product, but is a separate set of server files that you will apply to your evaluation server.
If you are already using UX sketches today then this incubator editor will work in tandem with the current plug-in editor so you can try out the new capabilities on your existing diagrams. Remember this isn’t just a mere replacement of the editors, but as mentioned above, this is a redesign offering many new compelling and requested concepts like full screen mode, zoom in and out, and part reuse (just to name a few). With your help we can continue to improve this UX editor as well as use your feedback to make further progress on the remaining visual requirements editors.
We are calling all RRC enthusiasts to take a look at the new editor and get involved with us in the development process for the next generation capability for requirements definition in Requirements Composer.
Jared Pulham
Senior Product Manager
Requirements Management Tools
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Frankly, RRC is the worst product in CLM!
@first10010 This new HTML5 editor is part of our efforts to improve the issues that people have had with RRC in the past. Are you able to be more helpful in letting me know what some of your concerns or issues are? Have you seen or evaluated our latest RRC 4.0.x releases? We’ve made significant progress and we’ve seen quite a uptake and positive response to RRC through our public forums and conferences.
Agree with Jared that recent improvements in RM are very encouraging and BTW, RM already outshines other vendors’ requirements tools.
@pulhamjk, could you look at this problem?
https://jazz.net/jazz03/web/projects/Requirements%20Management#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=69582
The display of page “jts/admin” is not consistent (JAF)
In our environment, the plug-ins are not useable. IT has the browsers locked down. This means the plug-in editors are ignored, and only text format artifacts are used.
I saw a demo of the new editors. Cannot wait for them to be in production so we can use the full range of artifacts!
thanks for this useful post…
Hi Jared
I have 2 ideas from RRC perspective I think will make it a great product.
1. Take the best features of Maqetta and put them in this new Visual Editor too, i.e the fact that it writes html,css, javascript, dojo code for UX Designers. You can also keep the very simple editors but I know my Development Team will seriously thank me if I’m giving them a head start with code associated with my UI sketches.
The editors cannot be dumb anymore and just be a way of me displaying my ideas of how the UI will look, it needs to do some work for me too.
2. Improve the Process Modeling functionality in RRC, IBM Blueworks is now the best tool for process models based on BPMN on the web, if it’s features were integrated into RRC it would seriously improve it.
Again it does more work for me than the features in RRC (great automatic documentation) so I am more likely going to want to use it than RRC on projects.
Also how about some UML capability so I can create class, sequence, state machine diagrams for my old school developers ?!
RRC would be best tool for these features due to it’s integration with CCM/RTC and QM..
Keep up the good work and look forward to future releases to see if these much needed features are there.
Smarter HTML5 Editors already available open source (e.g FROONT ) so don’t get left behind!.
Mark
The lack of robust visual editing tools is the biggest threat our fairly large BA department has to not being able to fully implement Rational. I’ll be testing this out, but it has been my #1 missing feature thus far.
If you or one of your team has some time, I’d like to hop on a quick call to discuss further.
I completely agree with 6. Thomas Stephens. We have the same problem that plugins are not really acceptable in our environment and thus this is extremely promising.
Furthermore, I have tried the new visual editor and the initial experience from using it is much better than the plugin. Its smother and seems faster.
great work – more of that please :o)
For those of you that are interested, the Visual Sketch Editor is now available in the sandbox for you to leverage and provide feedback, https://jazz.net/products/sandbox/ .