How can integration of one solution allow tools to support the product line variations and full product line development life cycle?
Charles Krueger of BigLever Software speaks about how his company uses IBM Rational tools in its framework. It uses Rational tools to consolidate processes into a single set of activities, reducing the duplication of efforts.
For example, the company is able to help a client build a single product and to customize duplicates as necessary, producing one system that can be configured easily in different ways for different systems. The streamlined process has yielded very high levels of productivity, efficiency, scalability, and time to market improvements.
The last few posts have been talking about the different product offerings in the IBM Rational portfolio. They help in automation of processes designed after years of extensive research based on interaction with customers and real world implementations. This helps in designing effective solutions for the real world problems faced by businesses today. All this information has been collated into two process frameworks catering specifically to agile software delivery teams. They are the Measured Capability Improvement Framework and Rational Practices.
Measured Capability Improvement Framework (MCIF)
The MCIF helps business owners and key stakeholders understand if the new approach adopted is delivering or not. This helps teams to continuously improve and innovate their software and systems delivery with the help of measurement and continuous improvement. MCIF also helps teams specialize and develop key competencies in agile development – practices which directly contribute towards business objectives.
Rational practices
The IBM Rational Method Composer helps agile teams with the right amount of leeway while dealing with processes, when they need it by providing Rational Practices. Irrespective of expertise level of the team, Rational Practices provides a customized approach to the various iterations of the Software Development Life Cycle and delivers more consistent results, quicker.
In our previous post, we spoke about the Jazz platform. There are other offerings from Rational which can positively impact the entire software development and delivery process. Various tools contribute towards different stages of the software development lifecycle. Capabilities like architecture management, change and release management, enterprise architecture management, requirements management, product, project and portfolio management, quality management and targeted solutions are all features of the various products in the Rational portfolio.
These capabilities can help you model and develop superior software and systems, enhance software delivery and lifecycle traceability throughout the entire SDLC and help you make the correct decisions to drive your business forward. Requirement management, alignment of business goals, adoption of best practices and assuring functionality, reliability, security and compliance are all possible with the Rational portfolio.
One of the main products in the Rational stable is Jazz – a technology platform for software delivery and collaboration. Built on the findings of extensive research, it is ideal for distributed teams working across a global network. It is pioneering the change in how people collaborate to build software while making them more productive, accountable and transparent.
Jazz helps teams collaborate, automate and report in a very efficient manner. Collaboration is achieved using social networks and virtualized team memory. This is very useful in overcoming spatial divide and differing time zones. Individual and team workflows are automated throughout the entire process – from requirements gathering to delivery and support. Jazz also enables implementation of processes – without any additional costs being incurred. Reporting is also enhanced using the Jazz platform. With an overview of the entire process and the ability to get real time information and insight into programs, utilization and projects, the team is better equipped to make more intelligent decisions. Information is available readily and contributes towards the continuous measurement of progress against the business objectives.
All of these also help in a cohesive integration of the different stages of the software delivery lifecycle.
One of the key tenets of IBM is to enable business innovation and agility. To develop both systems and operations, a large investment of time, people and money is required. To enable sustained growth, differentiation and innovation, software should be treated as an investment and an asset. It should also be treated as such. The growth of software is extensive and interconnected with highly intelligent programs and instrumented products coexist and contribute to the same network. To deliver software effectively, innovation must be enabled, costs lowered and change should be managed.
This is not possible with an ad-hoc approach to software management. Software delivery should be approached with the same stringent expectations as those of other processes. As a business process, it should be tracked, reviewed and revised as required.
IBM Rational’s offerings help make software delivery a core strength for your business. With offerings like processes, capabilities and a cohesive, collaborative platform, the pathway to success is set on a solid foundation.
The BigLever Gears Software Product Line (SPL) Lifecycle Framework provides a common set of industry-standard SPL concepts and constructs to enable the integration of existing or new tools, assets and processes across the full system and software development lifecycle – from business case and analysis, to requirements, design, implementation, testing, delivery, maintenance and evolution.
“BigLever provides enhanced off-the-shelf integration solutions that support seamless product line engineering across the systems and software development lifecycle. BigLever’s product offering includes a broad range of solutions for IBM Rational, Serena, Microsoft, Perforce and Open Source development tools.
BigLever’s integration solutions utilize Gears concepts and constructs to extend third party tools and ensure consistent SPL capabilities directly from the framework.
BigLever’s Bridge solutions make third party tools “product line aware” by incorporating standardized variation point mechanisms and enabling the execution of SPL operations – such as product configuration, variation point editing and variation impact analysis – directly from within third party tools.”
By integrating IBM’s Jazz-based Rational Quality Manager into BigLever Software’s SPL Lifecycle Framework, the new RQM/Gears Bridge enables development organizations to define test case diversity based on product line features and to manage test plans as first-class product line assets in the SPL development lifecycle.
“The Department of Defense (DoD) Architecture Framework (DoDAF) defines a common approach for DoD architecture description development, presentation, and integration for both warfighting operations and business operations and processes. The Framework is intended to ensure that architecture descriptions can be compared and related across organizational boundaries, including Joint and multinational boundaries.” (DoD Architectural Framework, Version 1.0, 15 August 2003)
The architecture of complex systems and operational enterprises require explicit relationship management and understanding capacities. It is imperative to understand the enterprise’s architecture to deliver effective design, implementation, deployment, and maintenance of evolving systems.
The IBM Rational approach to DoDAF is comprehensive. Our total solution incorporates an integrated toolset, a proven systems engineering process, and a robust enablement capability designed to facilitate discovery, description, implementation, and evolution of the complex enterprise architecture associated with DoD’s operational missions.
The tooling builds upon capabilities supported by the optional, downloadable DoDAF feature for the the IBM Rational Eclipse-based modeling solution family of tools (IBM Rational Software Architect, IBM Rational Software Modeler and IBM Rational Systems Developer).
IBM Rational’s approach to DoDAF incorporates a proven process for systems engineering with a powerful, integrated tool suite. It leverages the content of DoDAF products as enterprise architecture is incrementally elaborated from abstract capabilities to concrete logical and physical representations.
A robust, scalable process, coupled with automation, drives development of consistent architectural content in a centralized model repository. This provides necessary enablement for the larger development organization and key decision-makers of the operational enterprise.
Reference: An IBM Rational Approach to the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) Whitepaper
As the head of the IBM Rational India labs, I come across a lot of examples in my day to day work life on the software market and I get to see some best practices applied across Industry for software and systems delivery. I felt this is an ideal platform to share my views and interact with all of you interested in the same.
I strongly believe, that Software is the main component of Innovation and to be Innovative in this world, we seek knowledge and tools to support our cause and goals. From the Automobile major, thinking of the next big innovation to drive business growth, to the home maker trying to balance her responsibilities and keep her family happy, software is touching lives all over the world, in more ways than we can comprehend. A classic example is the Innovation by GM for its hybrid car, Volt which actually has many many more lines of software code than the first space shuttle launch. That’s the quantum leap in the use of software. The GM Volt case study is an excellent example and I urge all of you to take a look at it. Software is truly everywhere…
Having said this, as we get into an environment where software systems have to co-exist with widely disparate systems to achieve favorable business outcomes, there needs to be a slightly different approach to be successful:
An Incremental Approach to ensure all external/internal dependencies are being addressed effectively
Measured Capability Improvement around parameters that are essential for a successful outcome and if they are not on target measure & steer to achieve success
An Integrated Delivery Platform that can support an heterogeneous environment and provide real-time data for effective collaboration across multiple disciplines
These are my experiences and what keeps me up at night… I would love to hear your thoughts on this…
As we get into an environment where software systems have to co-exist with widely disparate systems to achieve favorable business outcomes, there needs to be a slightly different approach to be successful:
An Incremental Approach to ensure all external/internal dependencies are being addressed effectively
Measured Capability Improvement around parameters that are essential for a successful outcome and if they are not on target measure & steer to achieve success
An Integrated Delivery Platform that can support an heterogeneous environment and provide real-time data for effective collaboration across multiple disciplines
Waters is a manufacturer of instrumentation used for chemical analysis that’s used in the food, pharmaceutical and a number of other industries. Waters was looking for better integration and connectivity with all of its systems- a common platform for all its systems.
“About 5 years ago Waters made a number of additional acquisitions overseas and essentially wound up with a situation where we had 4 separate software development groups. Basically, we wanted to have a common platform for all of our tools in our systems that we were developing. So, we needed to have a solution that allowed us to have collaboration across all sites, but added in a manner that [would work even if] everybody can’t be available at the same time” says Don Cunningham, a business analyst at Waters.
Rational provided them with tools which are inexpensive and enabled them to quickly and easily answer all financial questions. The solution that IBM offered to Waters is really a system of systems.
To understand and learn more about the IBM Rational toolset, visit our page.
