IBM Rational Team Concert 6.0 continues to develop and improve the capabilities provided for users of z Systems and IBM i.

ISPF client usability

The ISPF client is still focused on developers and their day-to-day code changing activities. First of all a new command,  SRCHFOR, has been added, to make it easier for developers to locate artifacts.

Secondly a new ShareLike (SL) action code is available from the RTC ISPF client member list to simplify the process of sharing new members.

The final large change for ISPF Client Users is the addition of a repository compare so that developers can compare their local copy of a file with the repository. This new compare action is available from three different panels in the ISPF client: the data set member list, the z/OS Unix files, and the Pending Changes view.

Rational Team Concert Enterprise Extensions with UrbanCode Deploy

The standard Rational Team Concert (RTC) integration with UrbanCode Deploy (UCD) allows RTC to automatically push new builds to UCD. This works well for many platforms, but on z/OS the nature of deliveries is usually very different. On z/OS, only changes and their dependencies are required to be deployed and there may be many deployments to fit into a tight window. In order to better support this, RTC can now package build results (e.g. for Work Items and their children) into UCD component versions to be deployed. RTC ensures completeness of these packages.

In addition, RTC language definitions can now store the deployment type of objects.

And UCD processes can use these deployment types to determine and execute specific actions at deploy time.

Rational Team Concert Enterprise Extensions dependency build and promotion

Usability has been a key concern for this release and the dependency build has received a major overhaul. Firstly we looked at how to request what to build…

Then we looked at how to manage subsets so RTC now has a new subset editor…

Finally, the outputs from the build have been looked after too with a reorganized Build Map Editor and a completely new Build Result Editor.