Jazz Jazz Community Blog MBSE across the lifecycle: Introducing Rhapsody Model Manager

(NOTE: For the latest information, see Update on Rhapsody Design Manager and Rhapsody Model Manager.)

Are you designing and developing products that keep getting more connected and more complex?  If so, you’re not alone. The Continuous Engineering team talks to clients in many industries whose products are now systems of interconnected parts that are also part of larger interconnected systems–often Internet of Things solutions.  We see more engineering teams seeking effective model-based engineering practices, including model-based systems engineering (MBSE), as a way to get ahead of the complexity and to validate earlier and more often. They hope it will help them to communicate requirements, interfaces and other design elements more clearly with customers, suppliers and component teams. They say that rising compliance demands are pushing them into more disciplined change management and lifecycle traceability, at the same time as they are pressed to maintain or improve their quality and productivity. Sound familiar?

For teams using MBSE to help them achieve these goals, models and the people who create them must be first-class citizens across the development lifecycle, participating in activities that span the engineering lifecycle: planning, requirements elaboration and validation, change management, reporting, etc. A powerful technique for meeting these objectives is lifecycle traceability: asserting affinities and dependencies among pieces of engineering information and then using those links to automate analysis and reporting.  Most important are the connections between requirements and models, since all of the downstream engineering work flows from them.

For you to get the most out of lifecycle traceability, your engineering information (which is likely in various tools used in multiple engineering domains) needs to participate in the same configuration management regime. In the last year, as part of our implementation of OASIS OSLC global configuration management, we introduced “fine-grained components” for requirements and tests, and now we are adding them for models in a new model server.

Introducing Rhapsody Model Manager

Rhapsody Model Manager (RMM) is an evolution of web-based model management and traceability first delivered in Rhapsody Design Manager (RDM). This first release of RMM focuses on requirement-to-model traceability and configuration management and is designed to deliver enterprise qualities of service.

Here’s what it can provide for you:

  • Enterprise-class configuration management built on the proven Rational Team Concert SCM (source control and configuration management)
  • Requirements and model traceability using OSLC Requirements Management and OSLC Architecture Management services integrated with Rational DOORS Next Generation and Rational DOORS
  • Web views for creating and navigating OSLC traceability
  • Model files can be organized in fine-grained components in RMM, so you can link them with requirements in global configurations
  • Access control to manage visibility to portions of your models by partitioning them into components
  • Server rename support, so you can transition RMM and other Continuous Engineering tools from a test environment into production

RMM-project-banner

This is a typical work flow:

  • A team lead or configuration lead sets up a development stream in RMM with at least one component and contributes this RMM stream to a global configuration that includes at least one requirement stream or baseline.
  • A practitioner creates and edits models in Rhapsody V8.3.
  • A practitioner uses explicit change sets or configures Rhapsody to automatically check in his or her changes to the stream in RMM. He or she uses the RTC Eclipse client for most SCM operations.
  • After check-in and change set delivery, the model changes are visible in the RMM web user interface, which is textual (not diagrammatic) in this release.
  • Users can create links between requirements and models in Rhapsody, RMM, DOORS Next Generation or DOORS.

Some planning notes

This first release of RMM is designed for production use by new teams seeking requirement-to-model traceability in global configurations. Teams already using Rhapsody Design Manager can continue using RDM, especially if their primary use cases involve design reviews on the web or viewing model diagrams on the web.

  • RMM is delivered as a component of the Rhapsody Design Manager (RDM) product. RMM users need an RDM Design Management license, which is available as part of some Rhapsody editions or can be purchased separately.
  • RMM can be installed from the Design Management or Continuous Engineering installers. To use RMM you do not need to install RDM.
  • Administrators should configure either RDM or RMM to provide architecture management services for a particular requirements project area. RDM and RMM can use the same Jazz Team Server.
  • A Rhapsody client can connect to either RDM or RMM. If a user needs to connect to both RDM and RMM on occasion, install two Rhapsody clients on that workstation.
  • Similar to RDM’s Actively Managed mode, Rhapsody users need a Design Management license to load files from the RMM server or deliver changes.
  • For now, the user of any OSLC client creating links between requirements and models needs a Design Management license (user of DOORS Next Generation, DOORS, etc.). We intend to change this in a future release.

We have just published RMM 6.0.5 Release Candidate 1 (what we call RC1). You can see it and talk to development leaders at the Watson IoT Continuous Engineering Summit the week of November 14 in New Orleans. Or download RMM and try it out. You can get the corresponding RC1 update for your Rhapsody client from the Rhapsody open beta site.

Daniel Moul
Senior Offering Manager
dmoul.at.us.ibm.com

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6 Comments
  1. Frank Highstone February 16, 2018 @ 11:41 am

    What is the difference between Model Manager and Design Manager?

  2. Daniel Moul February 16, 2018 @ 12:36 pm

    Architecturally, Model Manager reuses the “hard part” from RTC SCM: an enterprise-class SCM rather than having its own custom-developed configuration management engine. In terms of features, Model Manager in this first release is stronger in traceability + configuration management + access control + enterprise scale. It does not yet have some features in Design Manager, including presenting diagrams in a web browser (the UI is text-only right now), and formal reviews (which need to be done in work items in this release rather than using a “native” process that understands the model).

    Note that RMM 6.0.5 became generally available in December 2017, and you can follow the current-release development plan via the link to the project dashboard at https://jazz.net/products/design-management/whats-happening#activity

  3. Sany Maamari September 14, 2018 @ 4:03 am

    Hello,
    Does RMM users need an RTC Developer Licence in order to push models into the central repository.
    I’ve seen this in v6.0.5, but don’t know if it is a defect or if it is how it should work.

    Here you say:
    Similar to RDM’s Actively Managed mode, Rhapsody users need a Design Management license to load files from the RMM server or deliver changes.

    But on 6.0.5, when we try to upload through RTC without an RTC Developer licence, RTC sends an error.

    Thank you for your answer

  4. PRAVEENKUMAR KOTRICK September 21, 2018 @ 9:20 am

    Hello,
    I have below questions
    1.Is RTC Client Mandatory to upload the models into RMM area from rhapsody client?
    2.Can we use RTC Web instead of RTC Client to upload the rhapsody models into Jazz Server?
    3.Can we update the rhapsody models directly in the Jazz server(RMM area)?
    4.Do you have a database approach of the Rhapsody Model instead of file based approach?
    5.Is there any plan to move Rhapsody Modelling also into Jazz in future instead of using thick client?

  5. Daniel Moul September 21, 2018 @ 9:54 am

    Re: comment (4): For those editing models, most of the user interaction is in the Rhapsody client, however there is a need to have RTC Eclipse client on your workstation, and there are some use cases that require touching the RTC client. RRM is powered by RTC SCM under the covers, which is an enterprise-ready, file-based source control system. As a result RMM inherits a lot of great capabilities. We are moving more of the version control operations for the models into the Rhapsody client, so the need to use the RTC client is going down release-on-release. We intend to build out model review on-the-web use cases in RMM (similar in spirit to what Rhapsody Design Manager does). Creating trace links can be done in the Rhapsody client or RMM.

  6. Daniel Moul September 21, 2018 @ 9:56 am

    Re: comment (3): an RDM license is needed to access models in the RMM server (check out, deliver, etc). If you are storing your models in RTC SCM directly (that is, not using RMM), then you need a RTC Developer license. If you are seeing other behavior, then I suggest opening a support ticket with the Rhapsody support team.

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