System iNetwork

December 4, 2008

IBM Promotes New Change-Management Software for i Systems

IBM's new Rational Team Concert for i suite of change-management utilities promises i system shops a bigger chunk of the Rational Developer for i (RDi) pie when it comes to simplifying, automating, and governing application development.

George Farr, worldwide product manager for IBM i tools and compliers, reports that the suite offers an integrated set of collaborative software delivery tools for IBM i development and management pertaining to source control, change, build, process, and governance in a single application that is native on the i. It also features specialized support for traditional languages such as RPG and Cobol and for multi-tier software development and application modernization efforts using RPG, Java, CL, and EGL.

"Rational Team Concert for i (RTCi) is the complete team collaboration environment for RPG, Cobol, Java, and EGL developers," says Farr. "It provides the entire roundtrip of software development: planning, process definition and enforcement, tracking changes to source, problem logging and resolution, compiling, auditing, and live reporting of 'your project health.' You have wished for a product like this for decades for IBM i, and now it is finally here."

The solution, he says, keeps an eye on the challenges organizations face in delivering high-quality, business-aligned software that adheres to compliance regulations and meets the needs of geographically distributed teams that must produce more with the same or even fewer resources. It provides a native i OS version of Rational Team Concert version 7.5 along with support for programming languages used primarily on the i system and its IFS.

Based on the open and extensible Jazz platform, the product empowers software teams to collaborate in realtime in the context of specific roles and processes by delivering new levels of productivity, agility, and innovation, according to Farr. It builds on the core IBM Rational Team Concert solution by providing a Team Server and Build System Toolkit that runs on the i. The new suite features the following integrated components:

Software Configuration Management: This includes essential software version control, workspace management, and parallel development support to individuals and teams to promote developer-to-team flow, integrated stream management, component-level baselines, server-based sandboxes, modules identified in streams and available baselines, the ability to store, control, and track changes to RPG, Cobol, and Java application sources in a repository, and support for the IBM i native library file system and the integrated file system (IFS).

Work Item Management: RTCi supports different types of work items for software development teams and captures discussions for later reference. Work item owners or interested parties can subscribe and receive notifications via RSS/Atom feeds. Team members can share queries with a group or with particular users. Functions include query editor interface and the tracking of changes to RPG, Cobol, and Java sources through work items.

Build management: The product also offers efficient scheduling and execution of software build processes. You can leverage multiple servers for rapid, cross-platform build processing and create a detailed bill of materials to enhance build reproduction. Additional functions include work item and change set traceability, local or remote build servers running on the i, build for RPG and Cobol applications on the i, support for Ant and command line tools for Java, and build definitions for team builds.

"I was absolutely delighted to have been tapped on the shoulder and given earlier in the year the mission of delivering this brand new product to IBM i customers," Farr says. "We use what we sell. Our own IBM i development teams actually used RTCi to develop RDi 7.5 and RTCi 1.0 releases months before the product was generally available. The managers found it easy to use to plan the work for each milestone, to assign work, and to track the progress of the team with greater visibility. Our developers loved the high level of integration of their development tools with the process and change management tools. RTCi really helped us to deliver our releases on schedule, including a 1.0 release that just shipped."

Farr adds, "This is the first of many releases to come to integrate RTCi with RDi to enhance development experiences."

Rational Team Concert for i was relesased in November on electronic media and will be available on physical media December 19. IBM is also offering free 60-day trials. IBM is shipping free trial CDs for new orders of WDS on V6R1. For more information, see the IBM U.S. annoucement letter.

--Vicki Hamende, application development and database editor

Posted by vhamende at December 4, 2008 8:31 AM