IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) 6.0.2 was just announced today and is available for you to use!  With the early feedback that we received from many of you through our Design Partner Program, Jazz.net, InnerCircle, and Innovate, we believe that this is a high-quality release with many powerful capabilities that you will want to familiarize yourself with and adopt.

Since many of you asked us for the next Extended Maintenance Release (EMR), I am happy to announce that CLM 6.0.2 is an EMR, and therefore is intended for customers who need a long-term deployment with defect and security updates. As an EMR, CLM 6.0.2 provides predictable maintenance for the full software development lifecycle. We recommend that customers on version 6.0.1 or any earlier release to upgrade to 6.0.2 to receive regular updates and cumulative, in-place iFixes.

So what is in CLM 6.0.2? Since I will not be able to cover all the new capabilities that we are delivering with this release, I would like to touch on some of the key cross-CLM capabilities.

• Enhanced support for Configuration Management and Global Configurations
  In CLM 6.0, we made our first major step into Global Configurations, enabling Strategic Reuse of various development assets, not just code, to help you accelerate development cycles, improve quality, and lower cost. With the improvements that we have made in 6.0.1 and with the 6.0.2 release, you can now improve your development efficiencies in delivering software-intensive product lines through the use of configuration management within and across their application lifecycle management tools. Improvements in this release include the following capabilities:
  – Custom properties and tags on global configurations to facilitate organizing them for reuse and other engineering considerations.
  – When merging requirements into a stream, you can specify the dominant attributes that will “win” when there is a merge conflict, enabling more complex automated merges.
  – Teams using Rational DOORS Next Generation with configuration management can employ built-in lifecycle filters.

• Support for the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) 4.0 – Released as Beta
  With CLM 6.0.2, we provide you with support for the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) v4.0. This is delivered as Beta templates for IBM Rational Team Concert, IBM DOORS Next Generation, and IBM Rational Quality Manager. With these templates you can quickly setup a SAFe infrastructure in CLM and start new agile release trains, helping your teams improve agility and predictability with role-based dashboards and continuously adjust business goals and priorities as needed. These assets are available for download from the following web page: http://jazz.net/safe .

• Jazz Reporting Service in CLM 6.0.2 Enhancements
  CLM 6.0.2 Jazz Reporting Service (JRS) continues to focus on ease of use for any practitioner to build and run their own reports. This latest release now supports many new report types, improves usability and help, and adds support for aggregation and roll up for reports built using  Lifecycle Query engine (LQE) as the data source. JRS is provided as part of CLM, enabling easier access to a mainstream reporting solution designed to support the majority of report types now needed by development teams. JRS was provided as a replacement for the previous reporting solution – Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence (RRDI). With this release, the new and easier reporting solution achieves near-parity with RRDI. We will follow with more details on JRS in a separate blog post.

There are many more enhancements in 6.0.2, and if I try to describe them here, you’ll stop reading. You can read more in the 6.0.2 New and Noteworthy pages (You can start with CLM or Continuous Engineering). New users can try CLM in the cloud or CE in the cloud without having to download and install it.

In addition, in the coming weeks be on the lookout for posts on more specific topics, including what’s new in RTC, RQM, RDNG, Rhapsody with Design Manager, RELM, and Reporting. We also plan to blog on how to keep your organization on track with CLM and SAFe 4.0, as well as on some interesting new partner capabilities making use of global configurations for strategic reuse.

I also want to take this opportunity and thank all of you for your ongoing participation in reviews and feedback throughout the whole development process – we are in this together!

Product-specific highlights

• What’s new in Rational Quality Manager 6.0.2
• What’s new in Rational DOORS Next Generation 6.0.2
• What’s new in Rational Rhapsody Design Manager 6.0.2
• What’s new in Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager 6.0.2

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