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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

  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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

If you are not familiar with the subject of professional licensing for software engineers, you can read a good synopsis here . Surprisingly (to me), the concept of regulating the practice of software engineering in situations where public safety is involved has been met with significant resistance and controversy. I believe this is an important issue, and it is becoming more important because the use of software-driven, safety-critical systems is drastically increasing.   My own experience Before I get into specific issues, it is important... [More]

IBM Rational's Enterprise DevOps Transformational Journey Over the last 10 years as an IBM executive, I have been leading large development organizations in the adoption of lean, agile and DevOps practices. These development organizations have spanned multiple geographies, technologies, cultural backgrounds and skill sets. Through these experiences, I have learned a lot. Mostly that these transformations are hard, take much longer than you want in a large organization, and that it is important to learn from others on similar journeys. In... [More]

In meetings with clients recently, I have noticed that more and more are showing an interest in program management. Over the last few months, I have been working with one specific client on their program management using IBM Rational Focal Point .   Program management is an interesting discipline because there are many differing views on what a program really is—whether it is something different from a project, simply a super project or a collection of projects. However, generally, when a client asks for this... [More]

Darrell Reimer, IBM Research Distinguished Engineer, and Adrian Cho, IBM SaaS and Service Engage Development Director, recently presented on how development has evolved  from waterfall practices to DevOps and beyond, to practices that deliver  greater agility and less downtime.   The old way of doing things was siloed, serial and slow. It created tricky development problems, long test cycles and difficult deployments.  Eventually, organizations figured out a more efficient way of operating with agile. Agile... [More]

Want to change the world?  Take advantage of the Watson Ecosystem to begin developing the next great cognitive computing app. In three years since its Jeopardy debut, Watson has made tremendous strides and has grown in its ability to help us solve challenging problems. Today Watson has grown into being a cloud service with millions of uses and based on a broad industry body of knowledge. Developers can partner with IBM Watson to use its Ecosystem to develop cognitive computing applications.    If you attended the Watson demo at... [More]

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the developer Pit Stop area of the EXPO hall at IBM Innovate. You may not have had a chance to stop by—but with open speed labs, a race track, drone helicopters, and occulus rift, it’s definitely an area that shouldn’t be missed!   If you want to get your hands dirty and try out some of the new developer tools you’ve been hearing so much about, the Bluemix@SPEED Labs in the Pitstop area is a must-see. You can find us giving demo’s and developing and deploying real apps... [More]

Ginni Rometty, in announcing the Watson Mobile Developer Challenge this past February, issued a simple challenge:  what will you do with Watson?    An enthusiastic response met the challenge, with more that 400 proposals submitted, covering many different areas – education, healthcare, retail, and physical fitness, to name just a few.  From the 400 proposals, 25 teams were invited to use the Watson developer cloud to create a prototype in a week – certainly long enough for those embracing agile development... [More]

We need developers who think like ops and ops who think like developers .—Gene Kim, Founder and former CTO of Tripwire This morning at Innovate we heard from Steve Mills, Senior VP and Group Executive, IBM Software and Systems, on how IBM transformed itself into an agile software development company through big cultural shifts and certain key principles, such as reuse. "The best code is the code not written," Mills said. "The best code is used over and over and over again." (And over again.) Who better to talk about... [More]

Continuous engineering is an enterprise capability that speeds delivery of increasingly sophisticated and connected products by helping businesses to evolve their engineering practices to adapt to the accelerating pace of business change. Product development processes and technologies need to evolve to meet the expectation for tailored and specialized products that are more complex and interconnected. IBM is introducing Continuous Engineering practices, supported by Rational solutions, that help businesses adapt to this accelerating change.... [More]

GE Capital has a vision: to responsibly move at market speed. The challenge is remaining secure, compliant and managing quality standards while moving quickly enough to stay ahead of the competition. Snehal Antani, CIO of CDF & EA at GE Capital, took to the stage during the DevOps keynote to tell how GE had leveraged DevOps to attain their goals.   He echoed what is already becoming a common DevOps theme at Innovate: It’s about people, the shift required to become lean and agile requires a commitment from people. How is GE... [More]

Watson has come a long way since its Jeopardy debut. Watson is adept in a wide range of activities - creating that perfect cocktail – the Blue Hurricane – a big hit at the IBM Innovate conference; empowering people to take a more active role in managing their health and the health of their loved ones; working through a cuddly teddy bear to help with learning activities for your children; and assisting in the fight against cancer.  Watson is drawing large crowds at the IBM Innovate conference. The Watson Mobile Developer... [More]