Getting started roadmap for Rational Team Concert
Introduction to Rational Team Concert
Rational Team Concert (RTC) is a collaborative tool that helps software development teams organize work and monitor progress in an agile, continuous delivery environment. Continuous delivery is about delivering software frequently. It focuses on speeding up the deployment pipeline – from source code to customer-executable code. Increasing delivery speed often necessitates increasing agility – the need to make changes to code (and to designs) frequently either to correct design faults or to adjust to changing customer demands.
With the following features, RTC assists teams to be agile and to deliver continuously.
Note: The resources listed on this page were created for a specific release, but also apply to later releases.
Product overview
Learn about the product in the formats that you prefer: short videos, help topics, tutorials, or online at Jazz.net.
Videos: Introduction to IBM Rational Team Concert Concepts and Processes, Part 1 and Introduction to IBM Rational Team Concert Concepts and Processes, Part 2
Help topic: Overview of Rational Team Concert
Jazz.net overview: Rational Team Concert
Feature overview
- Process flexibility: RTC provides process templates (such as SAFe) to fit various traditional or modern development models. You can also customize these templates if you already have your own special development model but don’t have a tool to build and replicate them quickly and share them with others.
Jazz.net article: New & improved SAFe® support is here!
Help topic: Working with process templates - Cross-team work allocation: Central to RTC is the concept of ‘work items’. Work items are the fundamental mechanism in RTC to track and coordinate development tasks and workflows. In addition RTC work items are the hub for linkage between all Collaborative Lifecycle Management artifacts.
Video: Managing Work Items and Status
Help topic: Tracking work item relationships across projects - Planning and execution: RTC provides tools to assist with the planning and execution of both agile and traditional projects. Regardless of the process used, plans are accessible to everyone on the team, and can change dynamically over the course of the project to reflect the team’s position and direction.
- Tutorial: Project planning
Videos: Tracking and Planning with Rational Team Concert - Quick planning: With RTC’s Quick Planner feature, you can plan flexibly and quickly. You can either plan granularly in the beginning or you can identify the major task categories and then work out the details as you go.Video: Using the Quick Planner Feature
Help topic: Managing projects with Quick Planner - The RTC interface is so designed that agile development teams can assign work items to the project backlog, and drag them from the backlog into a sprint.
- Collaboration: Continuous delivery requires a collaborative process that can penetrate the rocky boundaries between different coding, testing, user assistance, and deployment teams. With RTC you can easily configure the level of transparency, security, and interoperability that you need across your project teams.
- Help topic: Getting started with your development project
Video: Stakeholders - Progress monitoring: As you work on the item you can enter your progress as comments. Others can also provide their comments on the work item. When you complete the work item you can change the status as ‘resolved.
Development managers can view the progress of the work items and identify those that need a special push.
Video: Managing Work Items and Status
Tutorial: Using work items - Reporting and metrics: RTC provides comprehensive reports and dashboards to track project status. You get an at-a-glance view into all phases of your agile life cycle. Dashboards provide an at-a-glance view of work item queries, event feeds, reports, and other items that are critical to understanding your progress. Reports provide both real-time views and historical trends of builds, streams, work items, and other artifacts that your team works with.
Video: Introduction to IBM Rational Team Concert Dashboards
Tutorial: Using the Team Dashboard and My Work views - Backlog prioritization: Deciding what to take up next (backlog prioritization) is one of the essential requirements of any agile model. Starting with the ‘work item’ concept and ending with an elegant dashboard, RTC contains everything you need to decide what tasks must move from the backlog into a sprint.
Tutorials: Create the product backlog and Track progress by using queries
- Source control management: RTC’s component-based version control system focuses on supporting geographically distributed teams and has strong support for parallel and agile development.
Tutorial: Source control
Video: IBM Jazz Source Control: Accelerated Overview
- Facilitating the DevOps culture: The DevOps movement is gradually gaining momentum in large software development organizations. The need is for tools that facilitate a DevOps culture. With its sophisticated workflow tools, flexible process templates, and quick planning feature, RTC is a perfect collaborative and planning tool for working in a Devops environment.
Video: SAFe® and IBM DevOps, a winning combination
Getting started
By task
- Overview: Getting started with Rational Team Concert
- Quick Planner: Get started with Quick Planner
- Development plans: Getting started with planning
- Source control: Getting started with Rational Team Concert source control
- Change management: Getting started with change management
By role
- Project administrator: Getting started with project administration
- Test lead: Getting started as a team lead
- Lab manager: Getting started with team collaboration
For more information
Trial and demo: Rational Team Concert
About the author
Dejan Custic is a technical writer who works on the User Assistance team for IBM Rational CLM products. He can be contacted at dejan_custic@persistent.com.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2017
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