Right on schedule I am happy to mention that the v6.0.1 releases are now available for download. Others will write more about the new capabilities in each of the v6.0.1 product releases. Here I focus on teams doing baselines across linked requirements, tests and designs, parallel development, and ALM-level component-based reuse at a significant scale. These capabilities aid teams implementing strategic reuse practices, including product line engineering.

A new Global Configuration Management (GCM) application introduced in v6.0 defines federated streams and baselines across tools—including a hierarchy of configurations—which simplifies reuse of subsystems and components in large products and systems.

A primary focus for v6.0.1 was to make these new capabilities ready to use in production deployments.

• We automated common actions that can be laborious or error prone. For example, a configuration lead can initiate an action to create a baseline in GCM, and the system will delegate this operation to each tool contributing configurations—recursively through a global configuration subtree.
• Reporting on data in configurations is now supported for production use. There are more kinds data from the CLM applications available in the lifecycle index, and we reduced administrative overheads by providing default read access to users aligned with their membership in project areas. (All reporting on versioned data uses the Lifecycle Query Engine (LQE), which we first introduced in the Rational Lifecycle Engineering Manager (RELM) and now include with the CLM tools as part of the Jazz Team Server).
• It’s always challenging to find, understand, and make complete updates when changes need to ripple through a large set of linked engineering artifacts, for example, when requirements change. In v6.0.1 we built on the concept of “suspect links” to introduce three states related to link validity: VALID, SUSPECT, and INVALID. This information is reused across streams and baselines when the same artifacts with the same content are linked in multiple configurations. We believe this will help teams to be more productive and accurate as they analyze and prove the validity of their engineering data in safety-critical development projects.
• We removed most of the v6.0 limitations documented on the page where a CLM administrator gets the free feature key to enable configuration management in the RM and QM applications.

There are many improvements in RTC SCM, including some specifically for software developers doing component-based development with high levels of reuse. Rolf Nelson, the RTC product manager, will explain that soon in another post.

I’ve only touched on the many enhancements in the v6.0.1 products.  To learn more, see the “New and Noteworthy” tabs in the v6.0.1 download pages.  The CLM New and Noteworthy is a good place to start.

You can download v6.0.1 and try it yourself: get CLM 6.0.1 or the Internet of Things Continuous Engineering Solution 6.0.1. The IoT Continuous Engineering Solution is a superset of CLM that includes Design Manager and a pointer to an evaluation version of Rhapsody.  You can learn more about it here.

Alternatively you can try v6.0.1 in our sandboxes here on jazz.net. If you wish to try the new configuration management capabilities or use a sandbox with sample data, select the latest CLM milestone “with configuration management” when creating your sandbox.