Notes from Rational Support

Four more great articles give you 5 minutes of smart at a time in easy to consume segments. As we wrap up the year, these articles will give you quick and great information, but don't be fooled, these will serve to whet your appetite for even deeper information once you start. So grab some coffee or tea, and take 20 minutes to absorb these articles and lay out a plan for follow up in the coming slow-down.

5 minutes of smart: Manage change with work items- Developers can learn how to become change and configuration management experts by understanding how work items function. By using an automated tool -- in this case, the agile project management Rational Team Concert -- you make it easier to manage change in a software development project.

5 minutes of smart: Explore the testing process- Developers can learn how to become software testing experts by understanding how the testing effort process works in a software development project. By using an automated tool -- in this case, Rational Quality Manager -- you make it easier to plan, develop, and manage testing in a software development project.

5 minutes of smart: Explore the test management process- Developers can learn how to become software test management experts by understanding how the testing effort process works in a software development project. By using an automated tool -- in this case, Rational Quality Manager -- you make it easier to plan, develop, and manage testing in a software development project.

5 minutes of smart: Use source control to manage change- Using source control, developers can more easily manage source code, documents, and other artifacts that a software development team creates. By using an automated tool -- in this case, the agile project management Rational Team Concert -- you make it easier to manage these change in a development project.

image credit: (cc) Nina Matthews Photography

Do you know someone who deserves to be an IBM Champion? 

The IBM Champion program recognizes innovative thought leaders in the technical community. An IBM Champion is an IT professional, business leader, or educator who influences and mentors others to help them make the best use of IBM software, solutions, and services, shares knowledge and expertise, and helps nurture and grow the community. The program recognizes participants' contributions over the past year in a variety of ways, including conference discounts, VIP access, and logo merchandise, exclusive communities and feedback opportunities, and recognition and promotion via IBM's social channels.

Contributions can come in a variety of forms, and popular contributions include blogging, speaking at conferences or events, moderating forums, leading user groups, and authoring books or magazines. Educators can also become IBM Champions; for example, academic faculty may become IBM Champions by including IBM products and technologies in course curricula and encouraging students to build skills and expertise in these areas.

Take the opportunity to nominate an influencer of IBM Rational or Tivoli now. Nominations for the 2015 IBM Champion program will be accepted through Midnight Eastern Time, January 9th 2015. 

https://ibm.biz/NominateChamps

Nominations for IBM Champion are open to candidates worldwide, and candidates can be self-nominated or nominated by another individual. IBM employees are not eligible for nomination. 

Sarah Cogley - Tivoli IBM Champion Program Manager

Tracey Brown Burton - Senior Manager, Rational WW Client Programs

Amanda Bauman - IBM Champion Program Manager (Cross-brand)

If you’re a developer in a shop that uses Rational ClearCase and Unified Change Management (CC UCM), you understand why our source code management solution is needed to manage your build dependencies and complex components.   As your environment grows with thousands of dependencies, performance in your environment is critical.   This is one of the many reasons why customers engage the IBM Rational Accelerated Value Team.

In these complex customer environments, speedy execution can fall victim to many things, including the size and complexity of the global software development project teams, network infrastructure, enterprise storage, and not following best practices. 

A semiconductor and telecommunications company employs thousands of software developers in more than 150 offices spread across dozens of countries and myriad time zones. Their CC UCM environment is one of the largest in the world and as a result, maintaining acceptable levels of performance was a challenge.  It wasn’t until their AVP team members met with the Semiconductor Company’s chip design and engineering leads that they began to measure exactly how their erratic UCM performance was negatively impacting many of the Semiconductor Company’s users. 

CC UCM processes like rebase, make baseline, and make stream are critical tasks that are done one or more times daily by every member of the software development team.  The use of these ClearCase commands help streamline the delivery and tracks the dependencies of components and prior deliveries. Operations like rebase were taking some teams 20+ minutes to execute, and in a typical week, the developers in one of this client’s large project team rebased 994 times consuming 331 man hours.   Adding to their frustrations, mkbl (make baseline) and mkstream (make stream) had similar performance challenges but had larger impact to the development team in terms of lost productivity.

With performance data in hand, the AVP team collaborated with key ClearCase development resources to pinpoint the root cause and develop a solution.  A promising performance enhancement showed a 35% cycle improvement in the IBM lab’s test environment.  With good initial results in hand an enterprise quality solution was delivered to the Semiconductor Company within a couple of months.  When tested in the client’s environment with their high speed storage and network environment, the performance enhancement delivered a whopping 90% reduction in cycle time – from 20+ minutes down to 2 minutes!

In a typical week, a single Semiconductor Company development team executes the following activities:

Assuming this team’s activity is just 10% of the total UCM operations executed each week by the company’s global development team, the enhanced productivity is worth some $20M.

Annual AVP contract cost:  $208,000

Tangible ROI:  Incalculable!

Important note:  AVP clients benefit from being the first recipients of software improvements driven by these extended IBM team collaborations, but those with wide applicability are then made GA (generally available).  The performance enhancement that resulted from this effort is now available to all ClearCase UCM customers.  While the Semiconductor Company’s particular development process resulted in the spectacular 90% productivity gains other customers average 35% – which is significant!  In today’s brutally competitive marketplace a software enhancement that results in productivity increases is immensely valuable.   What can AVP do to help increase your productivity?

What's New in Rational Team Concert v5.0.2- In this video Rational Team Concert specialists guide you through the multitude of improvements made to Rational Team Concert version 5.0.2. Note this video is 50 minutes long.