Authors Bob Aiello (bob.aiello@ieee.org), Consultant and Technical editor, CM Best Practices Consulting (Division of Yellow Spider, Inc) and Leslie Sachs (LeslieASachs@gmail.com), COO, Yellow Spider, Inc. take you through a six part series on DevOps best practices ranging from an introduction and overview of concepts through security, implementation of ITIL, ALM, using the cloud, and of course testing.
DevOps best practices: Part 2. Ensure robust and effective information security with DevOps-DevOps principles, well known for helping developers and operations to work more effectively together, can be applied to information security, as well. Learn how DevOps can improve information security by applying industry-recognized best practices. Use the DevOps approach to keep systems secure, to prevent system glitches, and to ensure uninterrupted service.
DevOps best practices: Part 3. Implement ITIL with DevOps- Many organizations embrace the IT Service Management Forum (itSMF) IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3 framework, which provides guidance on the processes and functions that help implement quality IT services. However, organizations struggle with how to implement ITIL processes such as change management, service asset and configuration management, and release and deployment management. This article shares practical guidance on how to use DevOps practices to implement the processes and functions described in the ITIL v3 Core Transition from Service Design to Service Operation.
DevOps best practices: Part 4. Drive agile Application Lifecycle Management with DevOps- DevOps provides a set of principles and practices that help development and operations teams to work together more effectively. Most organizations recognize that that there are other key stakeholders, such as information security, Quality Assurance (QA), testing, and many others who can also benefit from the DevOps approach. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) helps to define the entire software and systems lifecycle, which encompasses a wide range of tasks and stakeholders. These stakeholders play an essential role to create reliable and secure systems. Apply the DevOps approach to improve communication and collaboration to drive the entire application lifecycle. Learn how to use DevOps to understand the dependencies between each of the stakeholders in the application lifecycle.
DevOps best practices: Part 5. DevOps in the cloud- To realize the true value of cloud-based software development and cloud-based operations, apply DevOps practices to help mitigate the potential pitfalls and risks associated with cloud-based computing. Learn how to use DevOps best practices to ensure that your organization can both use cloud-based development tools and processes and implement scalable, cloud-based operations successfully.
DevOps best practices: Part 6. Use DevOps to drive quality assurance and testing- Quality assurance and testing requires collaboration between many key stakeholders, because of this the DevOps principles of communication and collaboration are beneficial. This article explains how to use DevOps to drive quality assurance and testing and shows you service virtualization testing in practice.
Managing a complex solution roll-out using Rational Team Concert- This article focuses on the project planning and management capabilities of IBM Rational Team Concert showing how it was used to manage and deliver the roll-out of an enterprise wide application lifecycle management solution. The article shows how IBM Rational Team Concert can be used to streamline the communication between 3 teams involved in a deployment project: the end users of the client, the deployment team of IBM Rational Software and the Support and Development organization of IBM Rational Software.
Jazz Reporting Service (JRS) Workshop - Authored by Rosa Naranjo and Sudhakar Frederick, this workshop is intended to provide insight into the Jazz Reporting Service (JRS) introduced in CLM v5.0 and updated recently in v5.0.2. Jazz Reporting Service (JRS) is a lightweight reporting solution that provides practitioners with the ability to create their own reports in a powerful yet easy to use interface (without requiring Cognos expertise).
There is a YouTube video series on JRS below as well as a few Jazz.net articles along with the workshop instructions, so click through to learn more!
Learn the main guidelines to build an automated development and testing framework using scripts. In the following blog post, Aya Elgebeely (Application Developer, IBM) highlights how using scripts to automate your development workflow can have a magical effect on your work quality and performance:
Streamline development efforts with scripts- There are quite a few steps to set up an environment or modify and build a substantial amount of files. If you use scripts, one command can do all the work at once. That's a big difference (and savings in time and energy) from doing the steps one-by-one. This gives you the time to focus on the important and innovative tasks and let the script do the mundane tasks.
With scripts you can combine various technologies under one custom framework. As if you are playing with Lego parts; scripts are the connectors between the different building blocks of your build and test environment. With scripting capabilities the intended workflow runs automatically with minimal user intervention.
Develop Multilingual portlets with Rational Application Developer- This article explains how to use ResourceBundle classes for multilingual portlet development using IBM Rational Application Developer for IBM WebSphere Portal. IBM® WebSphere® Portal supports more than 30 languages for different locations. Various international organizations provide their portals for use in different countries or regions through multilingual Web sites. In this context, the portal concurrently serves portal views in the users preferred language to a large numbers of users. WebSphere portal supports portlets displayed in different languages. If a requested language is not supported, the portal attempts to match the user's language preference.
This article explains how to develop multilingual portlets using IBM® Rational® Application Developer for WebSphere Software v9 (you can use v7.5 or higher to follow the steps in this article). Code snippets to incorporate multilingual portlets using ResourceBundle are provided in the download section of the article.
Run hardware-in-the-loop tests with IBM Rational Quality Manager and ETAS LABCAR-AUTOMATION: LABCAR-AUTOMATION (LCA) is widely used in the automotive industry to run automated tests on hardware to ensure high levels of quality in safety-critical areas. Find out how to use LCA within Rational Quality Manager to ensure traceability, governance, and improved quality.
IBM® Rational® Quality Manager provides extensible APIs that enable test-automation tools from various industries to be integrated into the Rational Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) environment. These APIs make the automation tools' capabilities available in Rational Quality Manager, providing a rich user experience. After an integration is built, it goes through a rigorous validation process and then is available to users.
ETAS LABCAR-AUTOMATION (LCA), an automated testing tool widely used in the automotive industry, now integrates with Rational Quality Manager through these extensible APIs. MicroGenesis, an IBM business partner, built this one-of-a-kind integration, enabling users from the systems space to leverage the power of collaboration and the enhanced traceability of the CLM environment. (All copyrights and trademarks related to LABCAR-AUTOMATION/LCA are owned by ETAS.)
Deep Dive Data Warehouse Reporting using the Jazz Reporting Service- The Jazz Reporting Service is the new reporting solution from IBM Rational Software developed on top of the Jazz integration platform and is intended to support the authoring of custom reports for the Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution. A previous articles around Jazz Reporting Service covered reporting using the build in query builder [Haumer 2014], which allows end users to create their own reports almost right away with simple drag-and-drop gestures and selections. Another article [Shaw 2014] went one step further and demonstrated how to use theStructured Query Language (SQL) editor to modify and refine the underlying SQL statement that were generated by the query builder introducing some more advanced features.
In this article Dr. Einar W. Karlsen will take the excursion into Jazz Reporting Service one step further in two ways. First of all you will see how Jazz Reporting Service can be used to report on data in the Data Warehouse that is not exposed by the query builder simply by by-passing the query builder and using SQL statements right away. You will consequently need to create SQL statements from scratch which in turns requires some insight into the Data Warehouse. This leads to the second purpose of this article: none of the previous articles had an explicit focus on providing an overview of the Data Warehouse - its architecture, its schema's, tables, views, columns, solution patterns and naming conventions etc. Dr. Karlsen will, therefore, introduce you to some of these underlying (dark) "secrets" of the Data Warehouse in context of 4 reporting examples that each have a different focus.
Changing hostnames is a common need and a common question we get in support. Hostname changes can often become problematic if not done correctly. Luckily, we have a top notch support team ready to help! In this case, support engineer Mallikarjuna Manoj Kandala has authored the following developerWorks article outlining this process for Rational ClearCase:
How to change the hostname in the IBM Rational ClearCase environment - Making the task easier. The IBM Rational ClearCase environment is sensitive to any hostname changes on the system where the application is hosted. This article provides the steps to make the task easier for Rational ClearCase administrators. This article shows how to make changes to various server components of the IBM® Rational® ClearCase® environment, when the hosted system hostname changes. The content in this article applies to Rational ClearCase v8.0.0.x and higher, and only UNIX and Linux systems.
To introduce you to the best of Bluemix DevOps Services, Lauren Schaefer (Growth Hacking Engineer and Social Media Lead for IBM Bluemix DevOps Services) has written this four-part tutorial series.
In Part 1, you learn how to deploy and make changes to a simple application. In Part 2, you learn how to deploy an application that uses a Bluemix service. In Part 3, you learn how to use the planning capabilities in Bluemix DevOps Services to plan and track your app, how to add a new Bluemix service to your app, and how to write code that makes use of a Bluemix service. In Part 4, you learn how to use the Delivery Pipeline service to deploy your app to Bluemix automatically whenever you or someone else on your team pushes code to your project's repository.
As a bonus to all of the knowledge you get by working through the examples in this series, you also get an application that checks the prices of items in online stores for you, so you don't have to surf the web to see if your favorite items are on sale! (Can you tell I love to shop?)
Deploy an app to Bluemix from Bluemix DevOps Services
Make changes to an app in the Bluemix DevOps Services web Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
Intro to IBM Bluemix DevOps Services, Part 2: Deploy an app that uses a Bluemix service - In Part 2, you learn how to deploy an application that uses a Bluemix service. You start with the Lauren's Lovely Landscapes app you created in Part 1. You also work with the Fabulous Price Finder app, which provides you with the current prices of items you're interested in purchasing online with the simple click of a button.
The article below provides you with knowledge about Jenkins and shows you how to set up the continuous delivery framework with Jenkins. The framework can build and scan source code, install the successful build, run tests and send results automatically.
Set up a continuous delivery framework with Jenkins - The setup of the framework in a continuous delivery process is important. The framework determines DevOps's efficiency and what can be done in the continuous delivery process. This article contains information on Jenkins and demonstrates how to:
Set up the continuous delivery framework with Jenkins.
Apply this knowledge to the continuous delivery framework.
Implement the continuous delivery framework with Jenkins.
This three-part tutorial walks you through building a multi-tier web application from scratch, using IBM® Rational® Application Developer, the Java Persistence API (JPA), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), REST web services, and — for a rich Web 2.0 front end — the Dojo Toolkit. You'll end up with a fully functioning web application that displays data in a table that users can edit by double-clicking any cell.
Rapidly build a rich three-tier web app, Part 1: Build the database- The application architecture uses REST services to decouple the UI from the server, and it uses EJBs and JPA to provide a correctly tiered enterprise application. Some of these layers are unnecessary for the sample application, but the intent is to provide a well-architected example that can be scaled for a more challenging problem space. The high-level steps the tutorial follows are:
Build REST services for displaying and modifying the data and a rich Web 2.0 interface to use the services. (Part 3).
Deploy the application to the IBM Bluemix platform-as-a-service. (Part 3).
Rapidly build a rich three-tier web app, Part 2: Build the application tier- In part two of this three-part tutorial, learn how to use IBM Rational Application Developer and IBM Bluemix to rapidly build and host a multi-tier Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) app. Find out how you can save time in each stage: creating the data model and database, generating the data access code using the Java Persistence API (JPA), writing the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) and web services, and using Dojo to create a rich web UI for viewing and modifying the data. When the application is complete, you'll deploy it to IBM Bluemix, the IBM Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Rapidly build a rich three-tier web app, Part 3: Create a rich web UI- In Part 1 you created a database on IBM Bluemix, connected to it from Rational Application Developer, and populated it with sample data. In Part 2, you created the application tier consisting of an EJB for managing the business logic and Java Persistence API (JPA) entities for interacting with the database. Here in Part 3 you'll expose the EJB methods as REST web services and build an editable Dojo data grid for viewing and modifying the data. Finally, you'll deploy the application to IBM Bluemix.
This three part series of articles presents two mechanisms for integrating IBM Rational Team Concert™ and IBM® UrbanCode Deploy to create a continuous delivery process. The first approach included in Part 1 is a packaged out-of-the-box implementation that is easy to set up. The second approach, presented in Part 2 and Part 3, uses extensions to the Ant build.xml file.
Over on Jazz.net, the team has been publishing some excellent articles. Here are two recent articles you won't want to miss!
Rational Team Concert and Git Integration: Setup Guide- Starting with 5.0 release, Rational Team Concert comes with built-in support for integrating with Git, with the following salient features. This article touches upon the overall setup required for this integration to work; and, specifically describes the setup on the Git server-side.
How to keep your streams flowing smoothly in Rational Team Concert- This article explores some of the best practices for team-based Release Engineering in a Rational Team Concert environment using Jazz Source Control. In particular, we introduce two new features in RTC 3.0.1 that are designed to aid the Release Engineer in their day-to-day tasks: a new post-build option that automatically delivers changes to a chosen stream, and the ability to use the Pending Changes view to track incoming/outgoing changes from a stream.
A three part series by Jim Amsden (jamsden@us.ibm.com), Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM covering BPMN and SoaML integrations in which you will learn how to use the strengths of each standard to complement the other.
Integrating BPMN and SoaML, Part 1. Motivation and Approach- BPMN and SoaML are two recent standards adopted by OMG. The standards overlap significantly, but each provides a particular emphasis on service and process modeling. This article is Part 1 of a three-part series that explores how to use these two modeling languages (either separately or together) on the same or related projects. It introduces requirements and approaches for how to take advantage of their strengths of each and how to avoid redundancy.
Integrating BPMN and SoaML: Part 2. Concepts that guide integration- This article, part 2 of a 3 part series, explores the concepts that guide the integration of BPMN and SoaML. The concepts include how each language approaches encapsulation, contracts (or interfaces), structure and behavior.
Integrating BPMN and SoaML: Part 3. Mapping BPMN and SoaML- BPMN and SoaML are two recent standards adopted by OMG. There is significant overlap between these standards, with each providing a particular emphasis on service and process modeling. This article looks at how to uses their unique features together.
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.
Four great articles give you 5 minutes of smart in bite-sized chunks. As we move into the holiday weekend for our U.S. based employees and clients, these articles will give you a quickly consumable bite of information, but don't be deceived, these will serve to whet your appetite for even deeper information once you dig in. So grab a cuppa, and take 20 minutes to absorb this great info and lay out a plan for follow up in the coming slow-down.
5 minutes of smart: Tracing project requirements- By using an automated tool to facilitate tracing project requirements (in this case, Rational DOORS Next Generation), you can take charge and make managing project requirements a smooth, continuous process.
5 minutes of smart: How to link requirements to development artifacts- An important initial task to successfully manage requirements in a development project includes linking requirements and artifacts. Choosing the correct link type is key. Learn about links types in a typical RM tool such as Rational DOORS Next Generation. You can also experiment with the DOORSng tool in a 60-day free trial.
5 minutes of smart: Tracking dependencies between requirements and artifacts- When you use an automated tool to facilitate tracking dependencies between requirements and artifacts (in this case, Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software), you can obtain a project-wide omniscient view of all dependency links, and that's a good thing.
5 minutes of smart: Detect and analyze runtime problems with probes- By using an automated tool to facilitate development code testing (in this case, Rational Application Developer for WebSphere), which uses the Eclipse-based Probekit framework of Java code fragments that can be inserted into a program to provide information as the program runs, you make it easier to obtain vital runtime data on your code component.
IBM Rational Synergy for Rational Team Concert Synchronizer- Rational Synergy users can now migrate to Rational Team Concert (RTC) and migrate their source code data to RTC. This articles talks about the Rational Synergy for Rational Team Concert Synchronizer and who should use this integration. It also talks about some of the benefits, best practices, workarounds and limitations of the RTC Synchronizer integration.
Learn how to set up an IBM Rational Team Concert main build that performs an IBM Rational Developer for System z code review. Based on the result of the code review, the process either submits the build to compile, or stops and reports the code review errors. Apply the tested, documented sample described in this article to implement a similar solution on your own platform. The steps focus on the Rational Team Concert administrator who writes an Ant task to compile COBOL programs, depending on other previous tasks, such as quality control.
Figure 1. Technical context for the sample scenario:
About the Author: Corinne Blanchard has 20 years of experience in the application development field (Cobol, Pacbase, J2EE). In the last six years she has worked for IBM on Rational products as a client technical professional and team leader for Rational Enterprise Modernization tools. In 2010, she contributed to the IBM Redbooks IBM WebSphere RFID handbook: A solution guide and IBM WebSphere RFID handbook: A programming guide. In 2013, she wrote a workbook that explains the basics of IBM Rational Programming Patterns.
Clean Rational Team Concert build workspaces
When multiple builds run on multiple machines the process of maintaining the infrastructure can become a problem. In this article you will learn how an automated build cleaning process can improve the continuous integration environment and reduce manual maintenance.
Do yourself a favour and take a moment to read through his automated solutions and get started on that Spring cleaning a bit early, before your competitors, and get that build workspace spotless so you and your developers can work without the clutter.
While working the front lines in support over the past 16 years of my career, a small handful of issues always seem to crop up as the most requested items when clients call in. One of those items was consistently in depth question on how to setup SSL for any of the products I was supporting. So, of course I'm going to highlight an SSL article when it comes across my plate, as I know how important these types of setups are to you, or clients, with a focus on ensuring your environment's security.
Luckily, John Chewter, Chief Architect for Green Hat Technologies in IBM has written a wonderfully detailed article on developerWorks outlining this process for IBM Rational Integration Tester:
Using SSL within Rational Integration Tester- Overview of key material, the SSL handshake, and its use in Rational Integration Tester transports. Learn how to configure SSL and use the key material in IBM® Rational® Integration Tester to test and virtualize secure services.
Summary: This article explains the various key material types and how they are used within Rational Integration Tester so that it can connect to and test applications secured using SSL. In Part Two we explore how to use the HTTP(S) proxy server to record and re-route secure traffic by using existing key material, or by using the certificate and key that is included in the HTTP proxy server, within the Rational Integration Tester Platform Pack.
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