How can you deliver applications faster without sacrificing quality or control? How do you deliver 10X faster business innovation instead of 10% incremental improvement? New and established companies using DevOps have transformed their software delivery process and achieved dramatic improvements in speed, quality and business satisfaction. If you want to hear real life experiences improving operations with DevOps, watch the on-demand webcast.    

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When I was young and just starting my career one of the key lessons I learned from one of my first mentors was to always look for ways to improve.  Actively look for ways to learn more, and be open to new ideas. At the time this was revolutionary to me because I thought I knew a lot more than other people about certain things; this is one of the drawbacks of youth I guess. But I thought about it, took this advice to heart, and remember it every day. Always look for ways to improve what you do.    When I started playing on a... [More]

Tags:  test systems-engineering ibm-rational joannescouler process develop-test rational product-development grahambleakley engineering

Code Rally is a racing game with a twist: instead of driving a vehicle around a track using a controller you code an AI (Artificial Intelligence) to drive the car around for you. This Fall, the Code Rally Online Challenge will be held in North America, Europe, Brazil, India and China. Compete amongst your peers to put your skills to the test and race for the fastest time!  You will have the chance to compete on multiple race tracks for some awesome prizes. Looking for more? If you become the fastest racer in your region, get... [More]

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In my last blog post , I shared the 5 best practices my teams have learned during our own DevOps Journey.     Expand agile practices beyond development and test  to include client, business stakeholders, and operations to breakdown silos and improve outcomes. Shift Left with continuous testing using automation and virtualization  to eliminate long back-end test cycles and increase quality. Build a delivery pipeline leveraging tools-as-a-service  that enables developers to... [More]

Tags:  test development rational virtualization testing automation devops agile

IBM Innovate is  now   IBM InterConnect 2015 , taking place February 22 – 26 at the Mandalay Bay and MGM in Las Vegas, Nevada. At InterConnect, you’ll find  DevOps   and   Continuous Engineering  sessions, demos, and labs covering all aspects of software and product development: Agile Collaborative Lifecycle Management Continuous Verification  and testing  Requirements Management Enterprise Modernization Embedded Software ... [More]

Tags:  engineering continuous-engineering innovate development developer agile interconnect rational devops

Welcome to the world of performance testing . I hope that this blog helps decision makers understand performance testing. What is performance testing ? Here is a non-exhaustive list of different aspects of performance testing . There are many.   Types of performance tests   Load testing Load testing is appropriate when you want to know what your application does under a specific load. For example, what are the response times when 100 users send requests to your application at the same time? Stress testing Stress testing indicates what... [More]

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Recently, Gartner, Inc. positioned IBM as a leader in the  2014 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Software Quality Suites (ISQ)  report. For the report, Gartner evaluated 14 worldwide vendors, placing IBM in the number one spot in the leaders quadrant based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute. Testing is one of the key processes in the software development life cycle. The market has been steadily maturing to deliver improved user success, but technology changes like... [More]

Tags:  gartner devops software software-development software-development-life... testing development

In my role as worldwide support engineer for IBM Rational Robot , I received many questions about migrating Robot to Windows 7 as Windows XP went out of support April 8, 2014 . Wondering what's the big deal about moving to Windows 7? I'll explain what to do and present features made available again. The latter makes a migration even more rewarding.   Windows 7 and Rational Robot A big difference between Windows XP and Windows 7 is security, which makes migration no picnic. The first... [More]

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IBM partnered with Software Quality Engineering to execute a survey  that explores where today’s testers are spending their time, what obstacles they most often encounter and where they think their attention should be focused.  These are the responses from 250 test professionals - primarily quality managers, test managers and test leads - from around the globe, all with 6 or more years of experience. Check out the complete results of the survey.  

Tags:  quality testing test automation quality-management

Do you have data that is spread across many lifecycle tools and projects around your company? You can aggregate all that data and show it in reports in a single view in a Jazz dashboard.    There are two different types of data sources with the Jazz Reporting Service. With IBM Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM), the data source is the data warehouse; with Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager (RELM), the data source is the Lifecycle Query Engine.   Using the Jazz Reporting Service, you can report on the data in a... [More]

Tags:  rational joannescouler reporting relm ibm-rational clm jazz report

Look around you. Do you see an item that is manufactured? Perhaps you see a car, or desk, or the device that you are reading this on. And chances are the manufacturer of that thing has more than one model of that item. All those model types make up a “product line” for that manufacturer.   How do manufactured products get created? They are engineered. Teams of people work on creating that device for you to use. Business analysts create requirements of what the market desires. Systems, electrical, mechanical and software... [More]

Tags:  engineering ple product-development ibm-rational rational

The recent Invisible Thread blog on ‘ The Mars Climate Orbiter: what, why, and lessons learned ’ made me wonder if we have lost the art of good requirements engineering?  Both teams went off to work on their boxes, without worrying too much what was in the other box. New approaches to development, such as the use of User Stories in Extreme Programming and Agile, or more model based approaches such as Model Driven Software Engineering and the use of SysML for... [More]

Tags:  doors-next-generation requirements-management requirements systems-engineering doors rational-doors agile ibm-rational-doors engineering

What is cloud? Cloud computing involves computing over a network, where a program or application can be run on many connected computers at the same time. Although the term “cloud” is new, the concept has essentially been around for many years. Now, we are able to utilize the cloud for everyday work within the software development lifecycle. To help make this work easier, IBM has an end-to-end solution for development in the cloud, which I am going to detail in this blog post.   In recent years, we have grown smarter and become... [More]

Tags:  json bluemix cloud cloud-computing cloud-foundry developers developer sql development

The other day a governmental organization rang me to ask if Rational Functional Tester (RFT) supports a certain set of graphical user interface (GUI) elements. For the sake of anonymity, let's call these elements “nicheControls.” So nicheControls happened to have GUI elements that aren't supported by RFT. Maybe the developers chose fancy GUI elements to make the application more attractive or chose the nicheControls because of functional advantages. Whatever the reason, this organization now has the challenge of... [More]

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Want to learn more about how continuous engineering can automate your testing?  Join IBM at the NI Week 2014   conference to learn how to apply the joint solutions of NI and IBM to avoid rework and achieve quality faster.    NI Week 2014, presented by National Instruments in Austin, TX, August 4-7, 2014, attracts more than 3,200 engineers and scientists from a broad set of industries, from automotive and telecommunications to robotics and energy. There are many great technical sessions, panels, cases studies and... [More]

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Whether you want to migrate completely or create a bridge between your current IBM Rational products and the IBM Jazz products, the following guide can help you to learn about the different options you have from a technical point of view.   Toward the end of last year a new feature, IBM Rational ClearCase Version Importer, was added to IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC). This tool is now shipped and included at no charge with IBM Rational Team Concert V4.0.5 and higher.   ClearCase Version Importer is a one-way data replication tool... [More]

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You’ve written your mobile app. It’s deployed to an app store. But how much time did you spend improving the quality of your app? Mobile users have a low tolerance for faults. 79 percent of mobile users will only retry an app once or twice if it fails to work the first time . The quality of your mobile app will go a long way to determining the success of your app. Low-quality apps suffer from issues such as frequent crashes, poor... [More]

Tags:  mobile-applications rational application-development mobile-app-development mobile-application-develo... mqa mobile mobile-development application

The other day, a client called me about the following issue: a university with about 30,000 students wanted to put a course enrollment application online. By putting this application online, students would be able to enroll in courses remotely. Because the university starts enrollment for these courses every semester, the expectation is that this application will suffer peak loads. The university believes that 700 users will use the application at the same time. Therefore, the client sets a performance requirement of 700 users. This is just one... [More]

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The intent of this post is to provide an insight into the world of the systems engineer that is used to working on large embedded projects. Meaning engineers that design and develop products that fly, move on tracks or wheels and float, or in some cases submerge. It is a summary of a webinar I gave in February that has since been transcribed and turned into a white paper   What is it? Systems engineering spans all the disciplines involved in developing a product. It provides the means to specify the parts of the system... [More]

Tags:  systems ibm-rational embedded-systems continuous-engineering mbse systems-engineering rational engineering

In my last blog post , I shared the 5 best practices my teams have learned during our own DevOps Journey:   1. Expand agile practices beyond development and test  to include client, business stakeholders, and operations to breakdown silos and improve outcomes. 2. Shift Left with continuous testing using automation and virtualization  to eliminate long back-end test cycles and increase quality. 3. Build a delivery pipeline leveraging tools-as-a-service  that enables developers to commit code, test, and deploy to a... [More]

Tags:  devops develop-test development test agile

If you don’t have the right tools for quality management in place when you are working on a project, you could end up facing some tough challenges.   About four or five years ago, I worked for a defense company in Turkey where I was responsible for configuration management and IBM Rational tools maintenance activities for the IBM Rational DOORS , Rational ClearCase , Rational Rhapsody and Rational Publishing Engine (RPE) products. One day, our test team started to complain because they were having some problems... [More]

Tags:  rational rational-doors quality-management testing quality ibm-rational test ibm-rational-doors

I recently gave a presentation titled “Essentials of Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager ”. During the talk, my co-presenter (the wizard) Andy Lapping mentioned that a better title for Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager would be Rational Information Lifecycle Manager since the tool is not only for engineers but anyone who wants an easily consumable view of their linked information. The key benefit of the tool is that it indexes disparate data that is spread around the company so that you can easily visualize,... [More]

Tags:  joannescouler rational ibm-rational products engineering rational-engineering-life... product-development

Built in the mid to late 90’s, the Mars Climate Orbiter was fitted with the most advanced technology of its time, and it featured dual redundant systems and triple redundant software copies! What could possibly go wrong? It launched in December 1998 - everything was going according to plan. By September 1999, it approached Mars and attempted to go into orbit. Then - poof - it went out of radio contact! Two days later, it was officially declared "lost". The probe ventured too close to Mars, plummeted into its atmosphere, and... [More]

Tags:  doors-next-generation engineering continuous-engineering requirements-management rational-doors systems-engineering requirements

Complexity is the biggest challenge in delivering innovative products, systems and applications today. Engineers rely on a wide variety of tools in their daily jobs to deal with this complexity. A couple of these tools are Mathworks Simulink , a very popular tool used to create models of control systems or plants, and IBM Rational Rhapsody , which is used to specify the architecture, design and functionality of these systems. Both of these tools help you to manage complexity by providing a development environment where you can... [More]

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  The game is changing.  The medical device industry is experiencing game changing evolutions of technology that greatly impact the way we design, build and interact with medical devices and how we manage our health.  Most of this is due to the rise of technology made for, and popular in, other industries.   Mobile I remember my first “car phone” which was bigger than my dog and had to be carried around in its own bag and often didn’t work – but it made me feel pretty cool to be an early adopter of... [More]

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The connected vehicle is transformative. It changes the way we do engineering, the way we do business and how and where we are connected.    Connected to what? Today when we talk about connected vehicles, what we are talking about is the instrumentation and communication of vehicles to external systems. This could be your mobile device, smartphone or tablet, another vehicle (V2V) or a component of an intelligent transportation system (V2I). This inter-connectivity is commonly referred to as vehicle to everything or V2X.   ... [More]

Tags:  engineering connected-car iot automotive

If you are using IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Transactions (ITCAM fT) to monitor your applications, you have a duty to see if your client's application is available. How do you know if the client's application is online?    A tool that accesses it automatically would make monitoring simpler. In other words, you need a way to access the application around the clock, and you can do this by integrating ITCAM fT with a robotic monitor . But which Rational testing tool is best for you?... [More]

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Since World Cup fever currently has the world in a frenzy – particularly the Netherlands, where I am writing this from just after their 5-1 victory against Spain – I thought it would be good to share a footballing story from about 4 years ago!   Note that as a Brit I shall be steadfastly refusing to talk about Soccer!   Take a stroll down memory lane, to South Africa, with the dulcet tones of the Vuvuzela giving every team a great excuse for playing badly, and also giving the worlds media something to discuss between... [More]

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If the tool you’re using does not do what you need it to do in the way you were expecting, is the tool bad? Should it be consigned to a shelf to gather dust?   Having worked with software tools for a number of years, I understand that they all have their own personalities and quirks. It is always important for users to be formally trained in the use of the tools they use within their organization; however, in today's business climate not everyone has that luxury.   In this new blog series, I will look specifically at... [More]

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