Integrating Engineering Method Composer with Engineering Workflow Management
Bruce MacIsaac
Build Basis: Engineering Method Composer (formerly Rational Method Composer) and Engineering Workflow Management (formerly Rational Team Concert)
This article contains the following sections:
Integration tips
Creating Work Item templates with specified work item types
Documenting Work Item types
Commenting and process change management
Process enactment workshop
Integration tips
Engineering Method Composer (MEC) and Engineering Workflow Management (EWM) inter-operate in a number of ways to provide a complete process management and enactment solution. The benefits of this solution include:
- Simplifies and speeds project planning and work assignment by providing the ability to instantiate plans and work items in Engineering Workflow Management based on a process description in Engineering Method Composer.
- Ensures consistency and repeatability of plans by leveraging proven patterns of success captured in Engineering Method Composer
- Improves quality by aligning process enforcement, safety nets, and automation provided by Engineering Workflow Management with guidance, templates, examples, checklists from Engineering Method Composer.
- Supports statutory, regulatory, contractual and/or organization process compliance and simplifies process audits by providing full traceability from process descriptions (“say what you do”) to project work (“do what you say”)
Current Interoperability capabilities include:
- The ability for team leads or project managers to create plans and work items in Engineering Workflow Management based on proven process patterns from MEC
- The ability for practitioners to get the relevant process and practice guidance directly in the context of their work assignments
- The ability for practitioners to include process RSS news feeds on their dashboard that provide role, task and/or deliverable specific guidance based on queries of the method website
- The ability for method authors to leverage Engineering Workflow Management for configuration and change management of their process assets (Engineering Method Composer includes a light Engineering Workflow Management Eclipse client).
Note: The Engineering Workflow Management work item service is shared by the other Jazz-based Collaborative Lifecycle Management tools (ETM and DOORS Next). Hence many of these capabilities are also available to users of these other CLM tools.
Deploying MEC Generated Websites to the Jazz Server
The default Jazz server prior to version 6.0.1 was based on Tomcat. To deploy an MEC generated war file to Tomcat, you simply copy the war file to the server\tomcat\webapps folder.
After version 6.0.1, the default Jazz server is based on Liberty, and dropin deployment is disabled.
To enable dropins edit server\liberty\servers\clm\server.xml and set:
dropinsEnabled=”true”
You can then deploy by copying a war file into server\liberty\servers\clm\dropins
However, for the search feature to work, you must instead unzip the war file and copy the unzipped folder into the dropins folder. The folder name must include the application name and the “.war” suffix. For example:
${server.config.dir}/dropins/myWebsite.war/WEB-INF/…
For more information, refer to Deploying applications in Liberty.
Learning how to use MEC and EWM together
See this article series for an overview of how to use MEC and EWM together:
Process Enactment Workshop
See this Process Enactment Workshop for a detailed step-by-step walkthrough for using MEC and EWM together. This presentation has additional information.
Creating Work Item templates with specified work item types
If you want to generate a Engineering Workflow Management work item template with tasks or activities of types other than the default “task” work item type, then follow these steps.
1. Add the attached user_defined_types.xml file to the configurations folder in your library. Or append its contents to an existing user_defined_types.xmi file. This defines the type and relationships needed to define work item types and associate them to activities and tasks.
2. Create an element of type “work item type” for each work item type you want to reference. Add these elements to the configuration you intend to publish by adding the appropriate plug-ins and/or packages to the configuration.
Create corresponding work item types in Engineering Workflow Management (see Create a Jazz work item type from an MEC element).
3. Reference the appropriate work item type from each activity and task (use the “relationships” tab). If not assigned, it will default to the “task” work item type.
4. Generate the work item template as described in the online help topic
Create a Jazz work item template from an MEC process element.
Issue: What if you want to reference an existing work item type, and not create a new one?
With MEC 7.5.2.2, you can simply use a work item type element in MEC that has the same name as the work item type id in the corresponding Engineering Workflow Management work item type.
For MEC 7.5.2.1, you have to do a workaround, described below.
MEC assumes a specific naming convention. (It uses this convention for generated types)
The generated id is: “MEC.”<MEC element name> (all lower case)
Example: “MEC.story”
Existing work item types don’t follow this convention – so you can’t reference them using the technique described previously.
Solution 1: Change work item type ids to follow MEC naming
Edit the ids using Engineering Workflow Management admin interface
Solution 2: Fix references using XML editor
EWM: Create a project area from the existing template
(will be used for template editing)
MEC: Create elements for the existing work item types
Reference these in the work item template
MEC: Generate EWM work item types from these elements
MEC: Generate the EWM work item template
EWM: Fix the result
Export the work item template
Use XML editor to modify name references to use existing type names
Import work item template
EWM: Delete MEC generated work item types.
Documenting Work Item types
MEC can be used to document the states and behavior of work item types.
For that guidance to be available to someone using or creating a work item, there should be a link to the process guidance in the presentation of work items of the given type. If you generate a work item type using MEC, then a “process guidance” link is automatically available that links from the work item to the corresponding element in the MEC published website.
However, if you have an existing type, you need to add that link to the presentation for that existing type. See Including process guidance in the work item editor.
For an example of this, see the Scaled Agile Framework process templates in EWM. In this example, a link has been added for each work item type.
Note that if you plan to document work item types using MEC, and especially if you plan to generate work item templates that use those types, then you may want to define a new MEC element type for documenting work item types. See the Creating work item templates with specified work item types section for guidance on doing this.
Commenting and process change management
Comments can be added to published pages.
Discussions are stored on a Engineering Workflow Management work item linked to the page. The work item can be assigned to someone to work on, associated with a change set when the changes are delivered into source control. When the work item is marked as complete, the discussion disappears from the page.
To use this feature, you must do the following:
1. Install MEC 7.5.2.3 or later.
2. Create a project area in Engineering Workflow Management (EWM) where the discussions will be stored.
Add the users to that project area that will be adding comments.
If you maintain MEC content in EWM for source control, you will typically use that same project area for your discussions.
3. Edit the skin file ContentComment.js, changing the “configuration” settings at the top of the file as follows:
- Change the value of “showComment” to true.
- Change the value of “project_area” to match the name of the EWM project area where comment work items are to be stored.
- Change the value of “server_url” to match the URL of your EWM server. For example: server_url : “https://myrtc.com:9443”,
- Change the value of “category_name” to match a category in your EWM project area. For example: category_name : “category/level1/level2”. Do not include the <Root Category> in your category path name. (The category feature is not included in the beta release).
Other optional settings include:
- saveUserInfo – set this to “true” to save userId & password in a cookie so you needn’t keep entering that information. Note that this is insecure because then anyone with access to your computer can access the information.
- default_work_item_type – set this to the name of the work item type you wish to create when discussions are created. The default is”defect”.
4. Publish an MEC configuration as a Java EE web application (WAR file), selecting the new skin in the “publishing options”.
5. Deploy the WAR file on the EWM server (see the Integrating section for details)
6. Browse the WAR file. For example, if you published myprocess.war to an EWM server at : https://myrtc.com:9443 then you would browse to https://myrtc.com:9443/myprocess.
7. Scroll to the bottom of a page. Log in to your EWM account and start a discussion.
Process enactment workshop
This workshop touches on many features of MEC and EWM used together, including the lifecycle for managing and releasing processes and process templates, source code control using EWM, and customizing EWM process templates using EWM.
Refer to the readme.txt file inside the attachment for further instructions.
Process Enactment Workshop