Rational Team Concert Proof of Concept

Rational Team Concert (RTC) is built on the open source jazz server and focuses on collaboration, visibility, and Eclipse integration.  For the day we went through 7 labs as a team member on an 11 person team working on a single application.  This exercise gave us the opportunity to use the Team Concert client (Eclipse) and the web client interface to the product. 

We went through labs for:

·         Setting up a team

·         Planning work

·         Tracking work

·         Performing and sharing work

·         SCM configurations

·         Builds

·         Changes and traceability

·         Tightening up process

During the day, I had a private meeting with Dan Gouveia and Cayce Marston who were very helpful answering questions particular to our environment.  They were aware of the current issues with the Clearcase product set and felt that the current incompatibility with Visual Studio web projects would be overcome by migrating to Rational Team Concert.  We also discussed the product set architecture, licensing, infrastructure, integrations, builds, etc..

Licensing:

·         Team Concert comes in 3 versions NU’s needs are probably best met by the standard version.  The only reason to upgrade to the enterprise version is +250 users &/or high availability.

·         End users are licensed as Developers, Adv. Change Management, or Contributor (client).   Licenses are concurrent or named.

Infrastructure:

·         The Jazz App/Web Server (WAS or *Apache) *Recommended.

·         The Jazz server also requires a database backend (SQL Server, DB2, Oracle) not covered by the licensing.

Pros: 

·         RTC has customizable workitems and workflows.  Comes with the OpenUp ~Rational Process, CloudBurst?, Scrum, Simple.

·         Requires developers to associate code changes to assigned workitems.

·         Fully http based client (will work remotely).

·         Comes with a nice set of canned project management and software engineering reports for builds and assigned work.

·         Nice search functionality that uniformly coverers all workitems.

·         Collaboration features that support SameTime and other IM products.

Cons:

·         Team Concert – uses a Subversion like proprietary source control system (NOT Clearcase**).

·         Requirements Composer – Elicit, capture and elaborate, discuss & review requirements. Is required to integrate Ravenflow.

·         No project task integration for Primavera or MS Project.  Only IBM Project Conductor.

·         No CMDB integration other than Clear Quest.

·         Doesn’t support .Net builds without custom integration. 

·         Doesn’t support remote controlled builds without customization or additional 3rd party products.

**Two ways of working with Clearcase

1. Synchronize.  Bi-directional (e.g. nightly).

2. Bridge.  Checking out of CC through version some performance and network considerations.

Conclusion

The overall Rational / Jazz product set is a great improvement over the current product set.  It makes improves in every area over Clearcase process, reporting, security, performance, accessibility.   However, it is in a great state of change the newer products are currently replacing the ‘Classic’ Rational products and it doesn’t offer all of the heavy source control features that Clearcase does.

There is great potential for this type of ALM product and it will be a part of our infrastructure within the next few years.  We will need to look at our existing tools and processes to determine the best and hopefully least disruptive means of getting there.