We have been working hard on improving IBM Engineering Workflow Management (also known as IBM Rational Team Concert) in the latest v6.0.6.1 release. The new name “Engineering Workflow Management” reflects the fact that EWM orchestrates everything involved in complex software development including the structure of team membership, release cadence, team process, tasks, defects, plans, code, builds and releases. Key areas of focus for this release have been quality, enterprise agile and enhanced usability and scalability.

Enterprise Agile: Program Board

When I talk to customers I often hear that the biggest reason for product delays is not communicating a dependency across teams. These dependencies are often discovered too late and result in costly delays. The new Program Board is designed to address this issue. The Program Board is available from the plans menu. It shows the relationship between blocked by and depends on relationships for a set of work items scoped to a given timeline and project. It is useful for quickly identifying if there is a work item in your project that has a dependency on another work item but is attempting to be delivered or planned for a later sprint. The Program Board graphical visualization of dependencies can be used with any methodology (not just SAFe) that has parent-child relationships and uses the blocked by and depends-on feature of work items to denote dependencies. For more information, on using the Program Board with SAFe see Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) – PI Planning

Enterprise Agile: Select Resolution on Drag and Drop

You can now select the resolution when you drop a work item on a Taskboard or Kanban Board if a resolution is defined for the target state.  A nice feature that we first introduced in Quick Planner.

Enterprise Agile: New enterprise agile reports available online

Our resident SAFe guru, Amy Silberbauer, has once again outdone herself. Creating a nice inventory of enterprise agile reports that you can download and deploy. The best part is there is some really nice documentation on all of these great reports to help you use them.  For the latest enterprise reports available see  SAFe-Reports

For example, here are just one of the many reports Amy has created.

Usability: One click “create child work item” in plans!

We have added the very popular one-click child work item button to the plan editor.  The work item editor first got this feature in v6.0.6.  In v6.0.6.1, you get it in plans now too. Also, Quick Planner will now honor the default child setting defined in your process template in v6.0.6.1 that “Create Child Work Item” uses to figure out what work item type should be created for each parent-child it creates.

Usability: Required indicator on tabs

We’ve been addressing what I call “project paper cuts” in the UI.  One of these is when your busy working away and filling out a complex multi-tab display in a work item and then you go to save it and get a message like “Can’t save due to one or more required fields”. If there are many tabs on the form, it is painful to have to find the tab or tabs with the required field that needs to be filled out. In this release, if one or more required fields in a given tab are missing a value, we now show the red required indicator (*) on the tab so you can quickly locate it. The indicator is shown on both active and non-active tabs and it clears when all required fields on that tab are completed.

Usability: Filtering archived work item types

If you’ve been using work items and custom process for a while, you probably have faced the issue where you have decided to stop using a work item type that you previously used and replaced with a new work item type.  In this release, you can now filter out archived work item types by adding archived=”true” to the configuration definition of types in the process XML.  If you do this, then that archived work item type will be filtered from Create Work Item section in the Work Item component menu, creating work item in Eclipse client, type value proposals in Quick Planner, Type icon options in quick create box in Quick Planner, Create Work Item or Create Child Work Item or Add Work Item menu options in Plans, Parent/Children work item types in Program Board, type drop down in a work item editor, and OSLC dialogs. You can of course still see these work items and work with them. But your users will no longer accidentally create them or have to deal with a cluttered UI containing unused work item types.

Usability: Web Client enhancements for source control

There are numerous enhancements to improve the support for using Jazz source control from the web client. You can now from the web client UI, create and delete streams and repository workspaces, duplicate streams and repository workspaces, download the contents of a component or of any folder in a component as a .zip file, use locate changesets to discover which streams, repository workspaces, snapshots, or baselines contain a changeset or set of changesets, support compare operations on baselines, workspaces, and streams, and the baseline page now shows the baseline ID and baseline hierarchy.

Usability: Jazz Build administration completed from the web UI

In this release, we have finished implementing the Jazz Build Administration in the web UI.  So this means if you’re a Jazz Build user and you don’t use Eclipse as your IDE you can now create build definitions from the web UI without having to install an IDE just to get that capability.

Usability: Combine changesets

If your working on multiple changesets in your workspace and then decide you want to combine that work into a single changeset we now support combine changesets.  Combine change sets will combine multiple change sets into a new, single change set. You can use this feature in the client for Eclipse IDE, the client for Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, and the command-line interface.

Scalability: Managing snapshots and snapshot queries

We are continuing to make it easier to organize and support many variants in the Team Artifacts View. This release contains several enhancements for managing snapshots and snapshot queries in the client for Eclipse IDE. You can now save snapshot queries. Shared queries appear under the project area in the All Source Control Queries folder in the Team Artifacts view. Private queries appear under My Source Control. Snapshot queries in the Team Artifacts view can be expanded to show the query results. You can also put snapshot queries and snapshots in project area folders and personal folders. The Snapshot Query editor for saved queries and the Snapshot Search window now allow filtering by custom attributes.

Scalability: Improved management of suspended changesets

Suspended changes sets from all your repository workspaces are now shown in the My Suspended Change Sets folder under My Source Control in the Team Artifacts view. To reduce clutter, you can turn off the option to display suspended changesets in the Pending Changes view. You can also add any changesets to folders under My Source Control in the Team Artifacts view.

Scalability: Ability to export and re-import Jazz SCM Components

Do you worry about the growth of your database over time?  We worry about that too and have begun designing ways for you to manage the scale of data you might have in 5-10 years from now.  The first phase of the work is to enable exporting Jazz SCM components from your database and be able to re-import them if you need them back.  Not all of the space is reclaimed as this is not a delete operation, but the core capability is implemented in this release for both export and re-import.  You may find it reassuring knowing we are making progress on this.  Here are the details. This release adds two repository tools commands for exporting and importing components. The scmExportComponent command exports the contents of source-control management (SCM) components to a .tar file. The scmImportComponent command imports the contents of an exported .tar file.

Enhanced Integrations: Support for Microsoft Visual Studio 2019

You can now install the EWM(RTC) integration into the Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 IDE. As part of the new Visual Studio user interface design, the Team Concert menu has been moved under the new Extensions top-level menu. It is recommended that you install the first (or latest) IFix available for v6.0.6.1 as some final fixes for this support were added in the first IFix after v6.0.6.1 had released.

Enhanced Integrations: Git, GitHub, and GitLab:

To help ensure accuracy when associating commits with work items, new process preconditions were added for the Git push operation. Use these preconditions with Git pre-receive hooks to ensure that only commit operations that meet the criteria defined in the preconditions can be pushed. The new preconditions are as follows:

• Prevent linking to external work items
• Restrict associations to closed work items
• Prevent work item linking if the author is the approver

Do you have a lot of git repositories to register?  As an alternative to using the web client to register and manage external Git repositories in Engineering Workflow Management (RTC), you can run scripts to register, update, and retrieve information about Git repositories. These scripts are especially helpful when you register multiple repositories. The following Node.js scripts are available:

• RegisterGitRepository.js
• UpdateGitRepository.js
• GetGitRepository.js

Things to know about this release

Besides all the great features above it is important to note that v6.0.6.1 is an extended maintenance release so it is a great release to upgrade to.  If you want to see a list of all the features in the release please see https://jazz.net/pub/new-noteworthy/rtc/6.0.6.1/6.0.6.1/index.html

As you upgrade to v6.0.6.1 let us know what you think of it.  We spent a lot of focus on both quality and usability. Let us know how we did! Thank you!

Rolf Nelson

Offering Manager:  IBM Engineering Workflow Management (a.k.a. RTC)