Cast your mind back to (or if you’re young enough, just imagine!) the days before the world wide web. You’re doing some research for studies or your hobby, sitting in a library surrounded by books. You have so many different places to look for information, in lots of different formats, and perhaps your local library doesn’t even have all the sources you need. You have to jump in the car and travel to collate all the necessary input.

Fast forward to the present day, and a web browser is your gateway to a wealth of information. Search engines provide increasingly powerful ways to find the information you’re looking for, and hyperlinks take you around the world while staying in the same place. You don’t need to care too much where in the world the information resides or what technology hosts the data.

There’s a parallel in the world of developing complex and embedded systems, like aircraft, cars, ships, smart phones & medical devices. There are many types of engineering artifacts to manage, such as requirements, designs, tests and work items. These could be being handled using documents, spreadsheets and simple graphics tools, but these approaches quickly run into scalability, maintainability and lack of consolidated reporting challenges.

The next step up is to start to address the areas where, for your organization, the most immediate benefits can be realized. Perhaps you implement a requirements management, change management or test management tool. But while you’ll undoubtedly see quality & productivity improvements in that one domain, it’s still difficult to address integration across domains.

So you address a second domain, perhaps integrating requirements & test management or design & change management. Now you have integrated views, traceability and impact analysis over two domains. But even if you address multiple domains with the right tools for each, it can still be challenging to get consolidated views across more than two domains at a time.

Well that is how it was, until now. IBM is very excited to announce a new product, Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager (RELM) . RELM can help engineering teams to visualize, analyze and organize engineering data and their relationships (the links made between the artifacts mentioned previously). It is designed to help engineering teams make effective and timely decisions, improve reuse of engineering data and maintain compliance with standards. RELM builds a near real-time index of the data and relationships from source tools including Rational DOORS®, Rational Rhapsody® with Design Manager, Rational Team Concert™ and Rational Quality Manager. RELM delivers cross-domain views, impact analysis and the ability to group the data into product & system structures to support search and queries. RELM indexes linked lifecycle data that has been created to OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) specifications. You can get additional details on OSLC, including how to become a participating member, at the open--services.net website.

Rather than like the library based research where it takes considerable time and effort to find relevant, related information and to consolidate it into a meaningful report, RELM is more like an enhanced version of gathering together related information from the World Wide Web. RELM is designed to help engineering teams significantly reduce the time and effort spent extracting views and reports of relevant, related artifacts for the engineering task or decision at hand, enabling engineers to focus their efforts where it adds most value – designing innovative, smarter products & systems.