Collaborative Lifecycle Management "New and Noteworthy" in 2011

This is a summary of the new features and improvements in the 2011 release of the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management that are common to all the products in the release. Each product also has its own New and Noteworthy article detailing features specific to the product:

Table of contents

Licensing and platforms

Role-based client licenses

This release introduces significant simplification in licensing including changes to server pricing, client access licenses, and the types of licenses available.
First there is no longer a charge for the server. Access to capabilities is granted through the use of a role based license. The license choices are simplified and designed to work across the CLM solution. The choices are as follows:

  • Analyst – For those who are responsible for authoring, elaborating requirements.
  • Developer – For those who are responsible for developing software and/or conducting builds. Additional developer variants are provided for communities, small teams, and enterprise multi-platform development.
  • Quality Professional – For those who are responsible for planning, constructing, or executing tests.
  • Contributor – For team members who contribute to managing change, planning, or reporting on project status. The contributor license is available for users of the CLM solution, or for a user of any of the products that comprise the solution.
  • Stakeholder – Available for Rational Team Concert users who only need to view and comment on work items.

All licenses support the CLM integration at no additional charge.

See Licensing in the Rational Solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) 2011 for additional detail.

License types

There are multiple license types to choose from:

  • Authorized User Single Install (AUSI) – A license that is associated with a specific user ID on an instance of a Jazz Team Server.
  • Floating User Single Install (FUSI) – A license that is dynamically allocated to a user from a pool of licenses administered by a Jazz Team Server that is operating as a floating license server. When a user logs in, the floating license is consumed. When the user logs out, the floating license is returned to the pool.
  • Token License – A special form of fixed term, floating license managed by a Jazz Team Server that is operating as a floating (token) server. Tokens can be used with any mix of entitled products. When a user logs into a product a certain number of tokens are consumed from the pool. Upon logout, the tokens are returned to the pool for use by others. The number of tokens consumed is determined by the price of a license for the product.

There are options for both perpetual and fixed term licenses. Authorized and Floating User Single Install licenses can be purchased as a perpetual license or for a fixed term. Note that the notion of the term for licensing does not apply to subscription or support. Both types of licenses can be acquired from the Rational License Key Center

Consistent platform support

The server operating systems, databases and application server support is consistent across the CLM products (Rational Team Concert, Requirements Manager and Quality Manager.

The client operating systems and browser versions are consistent across the CLM products.

Minor exceptions exist. See System Requirements for Rational Team Concert 3.0.1, Rational Quality Manager 3.0.1 and Rational Requirements Composer 3.0.1 for details on the supported platforms.

Language support

Native language support is consistent across the full set of products in this release.

Flexible deployment options

The architecture has changed to a service-based architecture, allowing you to configure a solution that fits your needs. You can configure a solution that works for your teams by choosing a set of applications that share the same Jazz Team Server.

Application groups

With this release the CLM applications can share the same Jazz Team Server. Such a topology is referred to as an application group. The Jazz Team Server provides the basic services that enable a group of applications to work together as a single logical server. Product functionality is delivered in the form of one or more applications. Multiple products may share applications. Each application provides one or more capabilities that can be enabled by licensing. The applications in the CLM 2011 release are:

  • Change and Configuration Management (CCM) which delivers capabilities for Change Management (work items), Configuration Management (SCM), Planning, and Automation/Build
  • Quality Management (QM) which delivers capabilities for test management including test planning, creation, and execution
  • Requirements Management (RM) which delivers capabilities for capturing, managing, and tracing requirements throughout the development lifecycle

For more information about this architecture read Adrian Cho’s blog titled Building products from applications.

Product deployment options

The illustration below shows which applications are used by each product.

Products are composed of applications

Solution deployment on one server

The CLM solution can be deployed into a single application server hosting one or more applications all registered with a single Jazz Team Server.

CLM solution deployed on 1 app server

Distributed deployment across multiple servers

The CLM solution can be deployed into multiple application servers for increased scalability. The applications can share a single Jazz Team Server which may be hosted by its own application server or may be hosted in the same application server as one or more applications.

CLM solution deployed across several application servers

Shared license server

A Jazz Team Server can be configured to serve as a shared license server for one or multiple Jazz Team Server instances. A shared license server enables you to administer all of your organization’s licenses from a single license server.

Install and setup

With this release all products share the same install. Although each product has its own “branded” launchpad, the link from each launchpad to install the server leads to the same install. This means that you only need to install any one of the products to get access to the full set of applications and the capabilities they provide. It is the license keys installed into a Jazz Team Server, and thereafter assigned to a user ID, that determine the products being used by a user.

Guided installation for Jazz Team Server and CLM Applications

The installer includes a number of options for installation. For a single-server deployment, the Jazz Team Server and the Change and Configuration Management, Requirements Management and Quality Management applications can be installed in a single installation pass. To distribute the application group across multiple servers, the installer must be run multiple times, with the administrator choosing which applications to install on each machine.

Installing the Jazz Team Server and CLM Applications

Updated interactive installation guide

The Interactive installation guide has been updated to generate instructions based on the applications you intend to install. If you specify that you intend to install Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence, the guide will include relevant instructions.

Screen capture of part of the interactive installation guide HTML form

New interactive upgrade guide

The Upgrading and migrating section now includes the Interactive upgrade guide, to help you through the process of upgrading from a previous release. Using the same technology as the Interactive installation guide, the Interactive upgrade guide provides you with a form where you make choices that describe your upgrade scenario. When you click “Get your complete instructions,” the guide returns instructions specific to the choices that you made in the form.

Screen capture of part of the interactive upgrade guide HTML form

Integrated setup – 3 setup wizards in 1

The setup wizard applies to all applications in the CLM solution. After you’ve installed your applications, launch the set up wizard by pointing your browser to: <your.server.name>:9443/jts/setup. For a single-server deployment the wizard automatically detects the applications present on the filesystem. For a multiple-server deployment the administrator can supply the information for each application. Once all the applications are registered, the setup wizard will present the appropriate pages for finalizing the setup of each application.

Setup wizard

Administration

A single, shared Jazz Team Server means there is now a single place to administer users, licenses and lifecycle projects. Point your browser to <your.server.name>:9443/jts/admin to access the Jazz Team Server administration home page.

Administration UI

User administration

The user administration user interface provides one location to manage all users who are accessing the applications that share a common Jazz Team Server. As always LDAP is supported, but now you can connect to your LDAP server from one location.

User administration

Lifecycle project administration

The Lifecycle Project Administration (LPA) application is a new service that is included in the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management. The purpose of the Lifecycle Project Administration application is to simplify the management of projects across the lifecycle and provide a unified interface for managing related project areas in each of the CLM applications. LPA introduces the notion of a “lifecycle project” which is an aggregation of one or more artifact containers (project areas) from the CLM applications. LPA gives administrators a single user interface where they can create and manage lifecycle projects and the members of those projects.

existing project

Lifecycle projects are created from templates that define the artifact containers to be created as well as the relationships between those artifact containers. LPA ships with a number of predefined templates, but administrators are also able to define custom templates if the default templates do not meet their needs. Custom LPA templates give administrators a great deal of flexibility around the project areas that will be created, the process templates that can be used to create each project area, and the relationships between the project areas.

new project

Another important part of the Lifecycle Project Administration application is member management. LPA allows administrators to manage membership and process roles for users across all of the project areas that belong to a lifecycle project. In addition to these membership management capabilities, LPA allows administrators to specify a set of recommended role assignment rules for the lifecycle project. These rules define the relationships that are expected to exist between process roles. For example, a rule could specify that anyone who has the “Product Owner” role in CCM should also have the “Author” role in RM so they can create requirements artifacts. Violations of these rules are surfaced in the LPA member management page so they can be addressed by an administrator.

members

See Kai-Uwe Maetzel’s post on Administering Lifecycle Projects for more information.

Getting started

A sample application, online tour and tutorial are now included “in the box.” The sample application is easy to deploy from the lifecycle project adminstration page by clicking the "Create Sample" button. Once deployed you can explore a lifecycle project complete with requirements, development and test assets, all linked and ready to explore. Use the integrated online help to explore the sample application, or walkthrough the tutorial to learn a usage model for a hybrid agility@scale scenario

Sample Application – Money that Matters

The Money that Matters sample is a feature rich sample to simulate a real world use of the Collaborative Lifecycle Management solution. One of the advantages for you as a customer is that we have also written a compelling scenario around this sample that allows you to play the role of an Analyst, Tester, and Developer in all of these applications. During this scenario you will experience many important themes of our Collaborative Lifecycle Management solution.

MtM

The Money that Matters sample is a Lifecycle Project with project areas and associations in RTC, RQM and RRC. It only takes a few clicks to create the Money that Matters sample after you have installed the server. Our starting page for the scenario lists all the steps to bring you there.

MtM

After the sample is created, you will find a large number of sample assets pre-configured in each artifact container. Some of these assets are domain specific artifacts (e.g. work items, test plans, requirements) that are linked together in exactly the same way a real project would create artifacts and link them. This preconfiguration makes it possible to create everything you need to start the Money that Matters Lifecycle scenario. When you log-in with any of the predefined users of the JKE team, you can use the rich dashboards in each project to get an overview of the artifacts created.

MtM



To get a full overview of the scenario and the idea behind it, read Understanding the Money that Matters Lifecycle Scenario.

Money that Matters lifecycle scenario tutorial

The Tutorials section in the user documentation now includes the Money that matters lifecycle scenario tutorial, which shows how to align plans to ensure that teams share common project goals, with complete alignment across requirements, development, and test plans. The tutorial is based on the Money that Matters sample application.

Collaborative Lifecycle Management scenario

The Scenarios section now includes the Collaborative Lifecycle Management scenario, which shows how a team can use the requirements management, change and configuration management, and test management capabilities of Rational Team Concert, Rational Requirements Composer, and Rational Quality Manager to develop a product. The scenario uses image maps to guide you to topics that describe how to perform each of the scenario tasks. Each task topic contains links to other topics in the help where you can find additional information.

Screen capture of the top-level image map showing the tasks in the CLM scenario

Reports

This release introduces a common cross-application reporting solution designed to work with a single application group sharing a single data warehouse that can be used by an enterprise reporting solution.

The image below illustrates the scope of the reporting solution that comes out of the box with the solution.

reporting architecture

New common data warehouse for reporting

In the past, each of the products used their own data-mart (a small, product-focused data warehouse) to store data used for reporting. While this was great for product-specific reports, such as those shipped out of the box, the rich web of linked artifacts shipped with the new releases of RTC, RQM and RRC were begging for an integrated reporting solution.

Now these products share a common data warehouse where linked data from across the CCM, QM and RM domains are stored. You’ll first encounter this data warehouse in the Jazz Team Server setup wizard:

Server Setup Wizard

You can manage the data collection jobs that populate the data warehouse in a user-friendly administration page on your Jazz Team Server

Data Collection Job Status

The real benefits of having this common data warehouse become apparent when you want to write traceability reports, described in the next section.

Custom reporting with Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence

We’re excited to introduce a new report authoring solution based on IBM Cognos technology. Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence (RRDI) provides a web-based authoring and report management portal that you can use to make the most of the data in the warehouse.

Because RRDI has access to the common data warehouse, you can write product-level CCM reports, or traceability reports that span the linked artifacts from the CCM, QM and RM domains in a way that helps you understand your development process.

RRDI is a separate install and can be found in the “Optional Downloads” tab of the Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager or Rational Requirements Composer download pages.

Integration of RRDI reports in the web user interface

Writing reports in RRDI is great, but you want to view those reports in the the web user interface, close to your other artifacts, where you are doing your development work. Integration with RRDI is provided both in the Reports web user interface as well as in dashboards. Here’s what an RRDI report looks like in the Reports web user interface:

RRDI Report in the Dashboard

Here’s a dashboard version of that same report:

RRDI Report in the Dashboard

 

Lifecycle traceability

Software is developed through the efforts of many team members who are dependent upon each other’s work. Understanding and leveraging these artifact relationships is critical to effective application lifecycle management. Lifecycle traceability establishes relationships between software artifacts. Links between resources are the backbone for almost all features provided in the context of life cycle management. They allow for quick inspection and navigating between the resources.

With lifecycle traceability your team can identify gaps in coverage or make informed decisions based on business priorities. This helps guide the team in where to focus their efforts to drive toward completion. If you are working in a regulatory compliance environment, traceability helps you determine the changes that went into a build and the the result of delivering those changes.

Plans, Test Plans and Requirements Collections

The Links tab now allows you link to requirements collections and test plans. In addition you can browse requirement collections in place. Select a collection to see all requirements from it. Hover over the link and a rich hover shows the requirement details and all the plan items that implement that requirement. If there are no requirements you can create them in context.

Tracking requirements and implementing plan items in the plan links tab

Traceability views in plans

There is a new Traceability view for plans. Once the plan items are created and linked the traceability view visualizes the relationships for each plan item. For each item on your plan it shows which requirement it implements, which test cases provide coverage, and which defects affect it. In addition the traceability view highlights decorates test cases in the user interface with a red adornment in the upper right corner of the test case icon if the test case has a failed execution result. The image below shows a Plan traceability view with a a new link being added to close a gap. Links can also be removed directly in the plan. With configurable columns, links can be created in context. With color tagging to expose gaps traceability views become the perfect information radiator for your projects.

Traceability View

Traceability views for requirements management

The Requirements Management application has made significant improvements to create, query and visualize traceability links. You can now display traceability links both as columns in a query result table, and also hierarchically as a tree.

RRC Traceability

The requirements tracing viewlet has been improved to allow customizing content and appearance of the CLM traceability links.

RRC Traceability Viewlet

Traceability queries

Traceability queries can also used to answer meaningful traceability questions. In previous releases the traceability queries and filters primarily focused on identifying gaps. In this release, the traceability queries and filters focus on assessing quality. For example, queries are provided to identify plan items (or requirements) with tests not run, or plan items (or requirements) with failing test cased, and plan items (or requirements) affected by defects. These additional queries can be used to make informed decisions on where to focus your efforts.

Lifecycle queries

Automated Traceability links on defects

In this release we leverage existing links to automate the creation of additional links. This appears on defect submission. When a defect is submitted, traceability links to the affected plan item and requirement are automatically added to the defect. For this to work, the traceability links must first be established on test cases (test case linked to plan item, test case linked to requirement).

Defect links

When this is combined with a traceability view, teams can quickly scan the view to identify what ‘features’ are impacted by defects, and which have the most defects. This is particularly powerful for deciding which defects to fix based on their impact. By seeing which plan items and requirements are affected, teams can make informed decisions about which defects to fix. The image below is a traceability view that added the "Affected by Defect" column. Notice how the problem areas are immediately visible, which helps the team make an informed decision on where to focus.

Affected by defect

Tracking changes

Sometimes requirements are incorrectly or insufficiently written. Sometimes we need to change requirements that have already been written. To track these types of changes we’ve introduced a new link type called "Tracks / Tracked by." Defects can now be filed against a requirement, where the Defect Tracks a Requirement. The requirement is tracked by the defect. For tracking changes to the requirement a work item is linked to the requirement using this link type. Team members can subscribe to the work item, comment and be notified when others comment on the requirement.

A query is provided to identify all requirements with a tracked by link. Examples for using this query:

  • All requirements tracked by defects gives the analyst a view into which requirements to “fix.”
  • All requirements tracked by tasks can be named "New requirements change requests" to notify the team of the intent to change a requirement.

Track change

In addition, new links have been added to link from quality and requirement tasks to the corresponding artifact:

  • From a Test Suite, Test Plan, Test Case, Test Script and Test Execution Record to a Task
  • From a Requirement to a Task

Dashboards

Mashup dashboard enhancements

Dashboards now support widgets that run lifecycle queries. This means all users across the team can benefit from the provided lifecycle queries. A simple example applies to testers. Testers can now host a widget with a lifecycle query that identifies all "requirements with tests not run." This helps the tester or test manager quickly assess which tests to run.

In addition, dashboards now support Open social and IBM iWidgets

Personal Dashboards

Users can now create personalized dashboards. A personal dashboard is accessible to the user regardless of which application they are currently using. When navigating from one application to another, the personal dashboard is always accessible to the currently logged in user. All of your personal dashboards can be directly accessed via the Home Menu from any CLM application that shares the same Jazz Team Server.

External Content Viewlet

Mini dashboard

A mini dashboard is a miniature version of a personal dashboard. It is always accessible in the user interface in a new sidebar added to the web user interface that contains a single-column dashboard. Its user configurable content remains consistent as you navigate between different Web UI contexts.

The mini dashboard is always docked on the left or right side of the user interface in a collapsed view. Simply clicking on the widget expands the mini dashboard. Configure the mini dashboard and your most meaningful information is only a click away.

mini dashboard

 

Rich widget catalog

You have access to the full catalog of widgets available for any dashboard. The catalog is discovered for each lifecycle project. For example, a lifecycle project that associates a Requirements Management and Change and Configuration Management application will have access to the widget catalogs provided by those applications. A second lifecycle project that associates all three CLM applications will have access to the widget catalogs provided by all three applications.

In addition IBM iwidget and Open Social widgets are supported.

Shared applications

The new architecture allows us to reuse the same application across multiple products. This means you can create a lifecycle project where all team members share the same application and have access to the same data.

Shared work items

Planning can now include the work of the entire team. Analysts, developers and testers can share the same work item capability. Project managers can now estimate and include the work across the entire team to include the effort to elaborate the requirements, define test cases, write test scripts and so forth. This reduces surprises that can delay a release beyond the anticipated, while improving the shared understanding of the complete scope of the project.

Rational Requirement Composer and Rational Quality Manager projects can now use any OSLC-compliant change management project to manage their tasks. This means tasks management can be delegated to a Rational Team Concert or Rational Quality Manager project and you can use the full set of capabilities offered by these products such as work item customization, querying, planning and work item specific dashboards and reporting.

Task projects can be shared by multiple test or requirement projects or even shared across domains.

  • Business analysts keep track of which requirement documents still need to be composed and which documents need to be updated.
  • Testers create tasks to keep track of which test cases and test plans need to be created. Task are used to collect the test plan inputs such as quality objectives and business objectives.

Create task from a test plan

Configure a task provider

To define a task provider, go to the project area administration page and configure the change management project that manages the tasks.

Configure Task Provider

Shared requirements management service

Requirements are now managed in a common requirements management application. Testers can author test requirements and analysts can author the business requirements in the same application. This provides greater transparency and collaboration on the project requirements. Additionally test teams who only purchase Quality Professional licenses have access to authoring test requirements as part of their client license. To step up to rich requirements definitions, multiple requirement types and administration, testers simply purchase an Analyst client license and the rich editing capability is available with no additional software installation.

Improved navigation

Every release includes enhancements in usability and consistency in both the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of the solution. In this release we introduce a "Home" menu that helps you navigate around lifecycle projects. The home menu is located in the same location on the banner in all applications. The mini dashboard described above is another usability enhancement added to this release.

All applications share the same banner layout and we’ve purposefully removed product names from the banner, such that the product boundaries begin to blur, and the user experience becomes a seamless navigation of development artifacts. This blending is intentional, as we drive to make product boundaries and data repositories disappear into the background, enabling a great user experience emerge.

Common banner

Common banner

Home menu

Home menu

Mini dashboard

Mini dashboard

To learn more about the navigation for supporting integrated applications, see the Jazz.net blog on CLM 3.0.1 Navigation Features.

To see a video and learn about the design of the navigation system, see Design @ IBM Article: Jazz Navigation for Integration.

To see more information on our coverage and approach to consistent user interfaces, see the Jazz Web UI Pattern & Style Guide.

Dashboards and work items are no longer publicly available, so some links may be invalid. We now provide similar information through other means. Learn more here.
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