Deciding which Engineering Lifecycle Management reporting option to use
IBM® Engineering Lifecycle Management offers you four types of reporting options to use, which include Jazz® Reporting Service, IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Publishing, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool (BIRT), and IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization Engineering Insights. Jazz Reporting Service is the default reporting tool for Engineering Lifecycle Management.
- Report Builder to create or edit your report.
- Lifecycle Query Engine to index your Engineering Lifecycle Management data (a data source for Report Builder and Engineering insights)
- Data Collection Component to collect data from the applications and store it in the data warehouse, which is a data source for Report Builder
- Document Studio, an Eclipse workstation-based authoring environment for IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization - Publishing reporting templates, which includes report generation
- Document Builder, a web application that practitioners use to schedule and generate reports by using templates that are authored in Document Studio
- Engineering Document Generation, an embedded runtime component that is included with Document Studio, Document Builder, and the Engineering Lifecycle Management products, including IBM Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody® and IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS®
Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool (BIRT) is an open source project for document generation. BIRT is a legacy reporting tool that can be used with IBM Engineering Workflow Management , and IBM Engineering Test Management. BIRT is not recommended for new IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management deployments or new reports. Use JRS instead.
IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization Engineering Insights , can be used to visualize engineering data across applications and do interactive dependency analysis.
In deciding what option to use, you must also consider these factors:
- Depending on your applications and the type of information that you want to report on, your data can be collected in a data warehouse by Data Collection Component or indexed by Lifecycle Query Engine.
- You can use JRS Report Builder with versioned data with the configuration management enabled or unversioned data with the configuration management not enabled, or in the work items, artifacts are not versioned. If you collect data about configurations, you must use an Lifecycle Query Engine Type-filtered data source. See Choosing the right data source.
- ALM Cognos® Connector is no longer available.
Choosing the best reporting option
Use this table to make sure that you have the best reporting option or to explore other possibilities.
The following table lists various decision points. After you find the ones that apply to you, see which reporting options to consider.
Decision points | JRS Report Builder | Publishing Document Builder | EDG | PUB | Built-in BIRT reports in Engineering Lifecycle Management | Engineering Insights views |
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Generate informational formats. | Graphs, charts, row and column reports, drill-down data | Printable | Printable | Printable | Graphs, charts | Live views |
Generate output formats. | Export to dashboards and Word, Excel, PDF, HTML files. Note: JRS reports can be exported as PUB templates.
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Word, PDF, Excel, HTML, XSL-FO files | Word, PDF, HTML files | Word, PDF, Excel, HTML files | Dashboards | |
Use a mature set of predefined reports. | ![]() |
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For IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next only | ![]() |
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Create brand-new reports or customize existing reports. | ![]() |
No, import from PUB | No, import from PUB. Imported reports cannot include JRS queries. | ![]() |
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Scope agile reports across projects, teams, and iterations. | ![]() |
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Report on only one application. | ![]() |
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Report on the most recent data. | ![]() |
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Report on historical trends. | ![]() |
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Report on data within one Engineering Lifecycle Management application. | ![]() |
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Report on data across applications, even non- Engineering Lifecycle Management applications. | ![]() |
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Report on one application only. | ![]() |
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Report on versioned data in configurations. | ![]() Only with Lifecycle Query Engine |
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Create traceability reports. | ![]() |
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Add your report to a dashboard. | ![]() |
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Generate large printable documents that have custom headers, logos, fonts, and front and back matter. | ![]() |
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Include full requirements text and diagrams. | ![]() |
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Visualize complex engineering data. | ![]() |
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Customize data collection. | ![]() |
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Use multiple Jazz Team Servers. | ![]() |
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Where to find this option? | Installed with Engineering Lifecycle Management | Additional installation and license required. | Installed with Engineering Lifecycle Management products that include IBM Engineering Systems Design Rhapsody and IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS | Additional installation and license required | Manually installed | Installed with Engineering Lifecycle Management. Additional license required |