Overview of Engineering Workflow Management

Collaboration and integration across the development lifecycle

EWM makes it easy to exchange information directly in the context of your work. If a work item changes, you and other team members are notified of the change automatically. You can reference the change in chat sessions and link to artifacts. Stakeholders can stay informed about the status of work items that interest them.

Several views enable you to share team information. You can track team activity, present information in more detail, or configure which information is visible at any time.

Many aspects of the development lifecycle are integrated, including agile planning, process definition, source control, defect tracking, build management, and reporting. You can track and manage the relationships between artifacts, promote sound development processes, and gather project information automatically and unobtrusively.

Process configuration and customization

EWM projects follow a process. A process is the collection of roles, practices, rules, permissions, and guidelines that you use to organize and control the workflow for a project. EWM makes it easy and efficient for your team to follow the processes you define. Implementing a process alters the behavior of the tool, which makes conformance with the process more reliable.

You use a process to define user roles and their permissions for performing operations in the context of a project. The initial process that a project uses is defined by a process template. You can modify a template to meet your overall project and team requirements. Each component is process-aware, so you can add rules for behavior in the form of preconditions and follow-up actions.

Processes are very customizable. A process can be more or less restrictive, depending on your team's needs. You can configure a process to enforce different rules at different points in the release. For example, you might want to employ a more restrictive process towards the end of a release to reduce the risk of introducing regressions. One way to reduce risk is to require users to get approvals from team leads or peers before they deliver changes.

For details about configuring processes, see Getting started: Project administrator.

Change management

In EWM, you use work items to track and coordinate tasks, stories, defects, plan items, and enhancement requests. You can customize work items and the workflow process they follow to suit your project. You can also integrate work items with other change management systems, such as IBM Rational® ClearQuest®. For an interactive workflow diagram of using work items, see Getting started with work items.

Planning

The planning capability provides tools to help with planning, tracking, and balancing the workload of releases and iterations for entire projects, for teams within those projects, and for individual developers. Plans are accessible to everyone on the team and can change throughout an iteration to reflect the team's position and direction. For an interactive workflow diagram of using planning, see Getting started with planning.

Source control management (SCM)

The source-control system is component-based and has strong support for parallel and agile development and geographically distributed teams. The SCM features integrate tightly with work items, builds, and process-centric automation. EWM also provides integrations with other source control systems such as IBM Rational ClearCase® and Git are also provided. For an interactive workflow diagram of using source control, see Getting started with Engineering Workflow Management source control. For details about associating Git commits with EWM work items, and using EWM to govern Git operations, see Integrating EWM and Git.

Configuration management

ELM supports versioning of artifacts in the Engineering Test Management (ETM) and Requirements Management (RM) applications. In those applications, versions of artifacts are tracked in configurations. In the Global Configuration Management application, you can assemble configurations from multiple applications. Then, you can track and manage specific versions of artifacts across the development lifecycle. In addition to including ETM and RM configurations, a global configuration can include an EWM SCM baseline. For details about global configurations, see Global Configuration Management.

You can link EWM work items to specific versions of QM and RM artifacts that belong to global configurations. For details, see Linking work items to artifacts in Configuration Management-enabled project areas.

Build automation

The automation capability provides build awareness, control, and traceability to development and test teams. Team members can track build progress, view build alerts and results, request builds, and trace builds to other artifacts such as change sets and work items. For an interactive workflow diagram of using builds, see Getting started with builds. You can also integrate EWM with Hudson/Jenkins. For details, see Integrating EWM and Hudson/Jenkins build engine type.

Reporting

The Jazz® Team Reports component provides an awareness of the actions, behaviors, and progress of a team or project. Visualizing data about the development process can make trends that might otherwise be hidden or obscured more accessible. By making this information available at a glance, reports can enable effective decision-making.

EWM includes an extensive library of report templates, which you can use to generate reports that illustrate the status of a project. Some examples are reports that show build results, blocking work items, work items by team area, work items by priority, and project activity. You can modify templates and create templates. For an overview of Reporting capabilities, see Overview of Reporting.

Dashboards

A dashboard is a web client component that provides information about project status at a glance. Dashboards provide the option to drill down to get more complete information.

You can use dashboards in several ways:

Eclipse client, Microsoft Visual Studio client, and web interfaces

EWM offers several different interfaces, such as an Eclipse client, a Microsoft Visual Studio client, and a web client. The client interfaces provide developers with a rich, integrated development environment for building and delivering artifacts.

Specific capabilities for development on System z and Power Systems Software

For details about Enterprise Extensions capabilities, see Engineering Workflow Management Enterprise Extensions tours.

Part of the Jazz community

The ELM products are developed transparently on the open and extensible Jazz platform. On Jazz.net, you can download the products and their milestones, track development schedules, join discussion forums, open enhancement requests, and interact with the product developers. To learn more about the products, see the developer-written articles in the Jazz.net library or the topics about complex deployment scenarios on the Deployment wiki.