One of the great benefits of Rational Functional Tester and its Eclipse IDE is
that it can easily be extended with literally hundreds of useful open source components.
Our team had a hard time consistently automating GUI Flex applications using the
built-in support for Flex automation due to constant browser security patches. We
resolved this problem by using open source components that are updated more frequently
to keep up with the browser security updates that seem to come daily. This article
explains how Rational Functional Tester works in combination with Selenium and
FlexMonkium. Tim Hague provides step-by-step instructions to help you implement a
similar solution.
Applications that mash data together regardless of the backend systems that the data is coming from, to give the end user a seamless integrated representation of information, are in increasing demand. This article is shows how to use IBM Rational Application Developer 8.0.4 to create a multichannel composite portlet application that fetches and integrates data from IBM DB2, Microsoft SharePoint, and IBM Connections into multiple wired portlets hosted on IBM WebSphere Portal 7.0.
IBM Rational Focal Point integrates with Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) applications through its support of the Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) change management and requirement management specifications. This article explains how to take advantage of the CLM capabilities by linking Focal Point with Rational Requirements Composer, which elaborates on requirements and business needs, to Rational Team Concert for collaborative project management, and to Rational Quality Manager for testing. It also describes the reporting capability introduced in the Rational Focal Point 6.5.1 release, which is very useful for project managers to generate traceability reports to find out the current status of a Rational Focal Point requirement and business needs.
Users of IBM Rational Software Architect are familiar with its UML modeling capabilities, as well as its ability to transform a model into other domains, including Java, XSD, and WSDL. However, when it comes to using an energy industry information model and evolving the model into definitive message and service definitions that can be used directly in an SOA messaging infrastructure, there is very little guidance. This article describes a process and the use of Rational Software Architect extensions that use the International Electrotechnical Commission's Common Information Model (IEC CIM) to guide message and service definitions.
IBM Rational Focal Point version 6.5.1 offers new Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) integrations with capabilities for more effective portfolio management and decision-making throughout project lifecycles, products in development, and applications that you use in your organization. This article covers what, why, and how to take advantage of these integrations.
IBM Configuration Management Version Control (CMVC) is older software still in use in some mainframe systems, but it has been superseded by newer Rational software, including Rational Team Concert. The tutorial explains the Item Connector Framework for integrating the two repositories and provides sample code. Learn how CMVC artifacts can be mapped to Rational Team Concert artifacts by using synchronization rules and how periodic synchronization will help you get the benefit of both applications.
Modeling is an essential step in the process of analyzing existing code so that you can
make decisions about what gets reused. When you understand the overall architecture of the code,
building your products into a complete product line engineering (PLE) workflow becomes much easier
to do and to maintain. You need to understand how the code fits together, how you could best use
it in the future, and which parts you might want to modify. The main reasons to analyze code are
for documentation, reuse, modification, or maintenance. This article explains the keys to
successful reuse and how to reuse code by combining code-centric development with modeling.
This article covers the configuration of the Rational Change for ClearCase
Interface and using Rational Change and Rational ClearCase together for change and
configuration management. It highlights how Rational Change integrates with Rational
ClearCase to track the implementation of change requests. It is intended for readers who
have an intermediate level of knowledge of Rational Change and Rational
ClearCase.
The first declaration of the Agile Manifesto is "individuals and interactions over processes and tools," yet this fundamental tenant seems to get lost on many agile projects. Highly capable people guided by fundamental principles of agility are more important than any tools, technology or overly-specific processes and best practices. This article provides tips for executives, development managers, and agile team leads to strike the balance of structure and freedom so they can reap the rewards of high performance teamwork and more successful agile projects.
Many software development organizations are making use of outsourced development resources on their projects. As companies embrace agile and lean approaches to development, the question often arises – is outsourcing suitable in an agile environment? The answer is – it's possible, but it will require some careful forethought and some deliberate execution to ensure success. In this two-part article series, Tony Grout shares his experiences of where agile outsourcing can be effective, and the critical elements that must be in place to achieve optimal results.
Many software development organizations are making use of outsourced development resources on their projects. As companies embrace agile and lean approaches to development, the question often arises – is outsourcing suitable in an agile environment? The answer is – it's possible, but it will require some careful forethought and some deliberate execution to ensure success. In this two-part article series, Tony Grout shares his experiences of where agile outsourcing can be effective, and the critical elements that must be in place to achieve optimal results.
The "Agile State of the Art Survey" was designed to gather information about how businesses are actually implementing agile techniques. There were 168 respondents from around the world, working in various business sectors, including government agencies. These respondents shared details about how they have benefited from agile methods and the challenges they still face. This article shares some overall numbers from the survey and covers the top benefits and challenges.
Julie King is the Vice President of Consumability for IBM Software Group (SWG). She is a Distinguished Engineer and the Chair of the Software Group Architecture Board – a body which forms IBM's technical strategy and works across product lines and across teams to achieve a common technical vision. Julie provided leadership throughout IBM Software Group's three year agile transformation. We sat down with Julie to learn about the challenges they faced and the results that SWG has achieved.
Businesses need innovation in today’s marketplace. This is not always easy and, in many cases, a new approach is required to reinvigorate innovation. An agile delivery approach can provide substantial, quantifiable business value compared to traditional approaches, but you have to do more than decide that you're going to implement agile. Many agile implementations start off with good intentions, but do not deliver on the promise of agile because of a lack of experience, plan and executive sponsorship. If you can address these challenges, your agile projects are more likely to succeed.
"Disciplined Agile Delivery" (DAD) is a set of practices advanced by IBM to help larger software development teams be as successful with agile development as smaller teams. DAD isn't just another agile method; instead, it offers a hybrid framework that combines the best guidance from a variety of existing and proven agile practices. DAD also supplements common agile methods with enterprise guidance. As a result, it can help organizations with project teams of more than 20 people get the most out of agile development methodologies. When you form teams for DAD, there are a number of things to consider. The top five are the subject of this article.
Agile development is a collaborative, incremental and iterative approach to software development that can produce high-quality software on schedule and cost-effectively. Agile practices were initially designed for small collocated teams, but you can adapt them to fit a more complex environment. IBM has experience with this not only internally, but with other large enterprise clients. Among the most valuable lessons we've learned about implementing agile in the enterprise were gained while helping a large insurance company, we'll call "Insurance Co," with their agile adoption and their implementation of IBM Rational Team Concert.
By definition, the cost of failure in mission-critical products is very high. Applying agile methods to the development of the software and systems that run them can help prevent the defects that lead to failure. Agile development methods can improve product quality, reduce costs and the time to market, and increase the predictability of their outcomes. However, it takes some fine-tuning of agile methods so that they make sense for these complex and rigorous projects. Agile governance, dynamic planning, test-driven development, incremental development and effective risk management are the keys to successful application of agile in mission-critical systems development.
Does the term "documentation" have any place in an agile environment? The goal on agile projects is to keep documentation as simple as possible, relying on roadmaps, overviews and concepts rather than enterprise-focused details. But what happens when using an agile approach on more complex projects? For example, what if the team that writes the software is different from the team that must maintain it? Or what if auditors come calling? In these instances, basic agile documentation based on user stories alone may come up short. This article provides insights into how teams can take an agile approach to documentation in more complex environments.
This article explains how to configure IBM Rational
Performance Tester to load test document editing functionality of
the IBM FileNet Content Engine. This approach is based on the
learning from a customer benchmark that targeted large volumes of
content, where Rational Performance Tester was used for the first
time to simulate document editing functionality. This article is
particularly useful to software developers and testers who are
trying to evaluate FileNet Content Engine performance.
Debugging tools included in the IBM Rational Synergy collaborative change and configuration management software can be switched on and off. This article explains the tools and debugging techniques that can help in analyzing critical issues. Using them can help you gather useful information to share with support technicians when you report issues, so they can help you resolve the issue faster.
IBM recently released version 8.0.3 of Rational Developer for Power Systems Software, which provides integrated analysis, development, and debugging tools for IBM AIX, IBM i, and Linux operating systems. Although this is a service release, it contains some significant new functions, which the developer describes in this article.
Many businesses and industries depend on web-based software to run business processes, conduct transactions, and deliver services to customers. When a deadline looms, organizations may get frantic and sacrifice secure features to bring the application into production. This is a fast (and reactive) solution that results in a usually defective application. A better, proactive solution is to create a SaaS-oriented web application vulnerability mitigation policy (and employ a SaaS-based vulnerability scanner) into place that anticipates application vulnerabilities and has several solutions to repair them ready to go. The author will provide a roadmap to such a policy and illustrate using a scanner tool in the form of IBM Rational AppScan products.
Integration of the IBM Rational ClearCase configuration management tool with
Cadence Design Framework II software for electronics design and automation (EDA) enables
custom chip designers to perform ClearCase actions while in the Cadence toolset. This
makes parallel development, co-development, and co-management of hardware and software
domains and artifacts possible. Having common SCM tools for hardware and software
development results in more flexibility in system integration and offers several other
advantages. This article describes those advantages and some of the important features
of the ClearCase-Cadence integration.
Get an overview of the IBM Rational ClearCase and Rational Team Concert
integration setup to integrate ClearCase UCM VOB source code data into
Rational Team Concert source control management, using the ClearCase Importer.
This article explains how to import files and folders from UCM streams to
Rational Team concert and use of the Change Flow Target feature.
In this detailed analysis, the author explains design of an automation framework
that is independent of the objects in the application under test. The framework is
centered on the concept of creating objects dynamically at runtime, rather than
recording and storing them in object maps. By using the design advocated in this
article, you can develop a reusable automation test framework that can be imported into
any Rational Functional Tester development environment. As a bonus, it also drastically
reduces the development and execution time of test scripts.
Modeling RESTful web services is one of the newest capabilities in Rational Software Architect. In the process of explaining the REST modeling features, the author shows you how to design and implement a RESTful Bookmark service according to a UML model, as an example. You can use this new feature and newfound knowledge to create models that explain your web service models before and during development. This model of a model approach makes explaining your project to others far easier and clearer. It can also become part of user documentation.
IBM Rational Rhapsody 7.6.1 and IBM Rational Rhapsody Design Manager 3.0.1 provide new features and
integrations that help improve cross-discipline team collaboration and continuous development of
high-quality and safe designs. Rational Rhapsody Design Manager 3.0.1 improves the design management
capabilities by adding integration with the Mathwork Simulink, so you can share and review architecture and
algorithms together. Support for Elektrobit EB tresos and AUTOSAR improvements enable a continuous
integration and deployment development environment, with early validation for AUTOSAR-based E/E and ECU
software. These updates also include improvements for systems engineering, safety-critical development, and
many usability enhancements.
This article uses two examples to explain how to use Rational AppScan Standard Edition v8.5 for
automated security vulnerability testing of web and web service applications. The authors also set the stage
for examples to explore the regulatory compliance reporting capabilities.
Get an overview of designing business processes and services, the roles and tools
involved, and workflows that software architects can use. The author highlights
advantages of assembling the participants and services in a business process or service
and provides examples to demonstrate the effects that different models have on the tools
used to generate deployable artifacts. She also explains techniques to use to achieve
good results, even from incomplete models, and summarizes the SoaML modeling practices
to use when assembling processes and services.
Learn how to build a dimensional data model IBM InfoSphere Data Architect that efficiently captures analytical requirements at the
logical and physical levels of detail.
IBM InfoSphere Data Architect is a collaborative data design solution that helps you discover, model, relate, and standardize diverse and distributed data
assets.
It is a pivotal component of the IBM Integrated Data Management (IDM) initiative to enable an integrated data management environment throughout the entire
data management lifecyle.
W3C defines a wide range of standards for the Semantic Web and Linked Data suitable for many
possible use cases. While using Linked Data as an application integration technology in the
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) domain, IBM has found that there are often several possible
ways of applying the existing standards, yet little guidance is provided on how to combine them.
This article explains motivating background information and a proposal for a Basic Profile for
Linked Data.
In enterprise architecture (EA), it is very important to keep track of the requirements associated with the EA artifacts. This article explains how to synchronize and map the EA data within the Rational DOORS requirements management software with Rational System Architect to track any requirements associated with the EA artifacts.
Agile methodologies are attractive to software developers in many different
industries because they can provide a process that allows teams to respond to change and
deliver higher-quality products that meet the needs of their stakeholders, on time. IBM
Rational Team Concert helps to jump start teams on agile planning and management. It
works well with Rational change and configuration management tools that you already use
so that teams can leverage their existing investments and minimize their additional
costs as they make this transition.
This is the first in a series of four articles about using the IBM Rational Publishing Engine to generate compliance-relevant reports. Part 1 gives a short overview of the software, describes the report development workflow, and provides a sample report as a basis for showing the capabilities of the tool in the subsequent articles.
This is the final article in a four-part series about using IBM® Rational®
Publishing Engine to generate compliance-relevant reports. Using two IBM® Rational®
Quality Manage reports as examples, it shows how to test, check, and deploy the
documents and templates that you have developed.
Part 3 this series of four articles shows how to create reports that take information from several data sources, including software from other companies. It explains how Rational Publishing Engine establishes traces from information in one tool to data managed by another and then combines them into the same document.
Part 2 in this series of four articles about using the IBM Rational Publishing Engine to generate compliance-relevant reports shows how to decompose large and complex reports into smaller, more manageable templates. It also covers developing reusable templates and creating a standard layout that adheres to your company's style guidelines.
Telecom products' interaction with particular network equipment, such as softswitches from a
manufacturer, may require customizing the solution or service that interacts
with it. Find out how to develop a custom web service implementation using IBM
WebSphere Telecom Web Services Server as the development platform to cater to
functioning of the solution with the specific softswitch.
The Baseline Manager Library in IBM Rational RequisitePro is an API that you can use to
create baselines programmatically. Write scripts to tailor processes for creating baselines for
multiple projects, or schedule scripts to be run as a time-based task. With this library, you can
create baselines of requirements that you keep in documents, the Attribute Matrix views, packages,
or entire projects.
Distributed systems are inherently data-oriented, with data entities dictating the sub-system
boundaries and specific data interaction that defines the dynamic characteristic of a system. The focus on
data entities and their behavior in distributed environments cannot be undermined. Thus the derivation of
ports and interfaces (data interactions and attributes) being a consequence of functional analysis in a
typical MBSE workflow, such as the IBM Rational Harmony systems engineering process seems an oddity in such
a case. In this article, we explore how to develop an MBSE process suited for analysis and design of
distributed systems.
Modeling has been an important part of systems engineering since its inception.
During the last decade, engineers have significantly increased their use of model-based
technologies to evolve a new discipline of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). This
discipline differs from traditional systems engineering in that it emphasizes a central
system model that captures both system requirements as well as the design decisions that
fulfill them. In addition to serving as a knowledge repository for systems engineering
work artifacts, the system model can also be simulated to validate cost or performance
studies and design choices. Highly practiced MBSE processes like IBM Rational Harmony
for Systems Engineers focus on system functional analysis, which is the translation of
functional requirements into a coherent description of system operations. The system
operations are then used to derive ports and interfaces among the allocated system
architecture blocks. These interfaces form the basis of the formal hand-off among
various sub-systems.
You can use several relational database management system (RDBMS) with IBM
Rational ClearQuest versions 7.1.2 and higher, including Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server,
Microsoft Access, and DB2. Unlike the other systems, DB2 is bundled with Rational
ClearQuest. The benefit to using DB2 as a backend database can be realized in the costs
you save, but installing and configuring it can be challenging especially if you are not
familiar with DB2. In this article, we provide instructions to help you install and
configure DB2 on UNIX operating systems to use as a backend database with Rational
ClearQuest.
Software maintenance can require up to 70% of your IT budget, so managing change to shorten
the maintenance cycle, reduce risk, and ensure quality is critical in today's economic climate.
This series of three articles explains how you can use IBM Rational Asset Analyzer to achieve
those goals. The focus is on changes to data definitions and data characteristics, but the
concepts can be applied more broadly to other application components. These articles also focus on
mainframe-based applications: COBOL programs and copybooks, IBM DB2 data definitions, and CICS
applications.
Software maintenance can require up to 70% of IT's budget, so managing change to shorten the maintenance cycle, reduce risk, and ensure quality is critical in today's economic climate. This series of three articles explains how you can use IBM Rational Asset Analyzer to achieve those goals, specifically for mainframe-based applications. Part 3 describes how to customize the impact analysis results and aggregate those results, using the Custom Query capability, and then how to create a “bill of materials” based on those results and share it as a spreadsheet.
Software maintenance can require up to 70% of IT's budget, so managing change to shorten the maintenance cycle, reduce risk, and ensure quality is critical in today's economic climate. This series of three articles explains how you can use IBM Rational Asset Analyzer to achieve those goals, specifically for mainframe-based applications. Part 2 describes how to perform change impact analysis to manage the scope and risk of a software change request.
The authors explore how you can use IBM Rational Build Forge -- an adaptive process-execution framework that automates, manages, and tracks the processes between each component involved with software development -- to automate the build and release process in IBM SmartCloud Enterprise. They explain the steps involved in using Build Forge and Build Forge Agent to automate a process and provide an example through a use case.
First, the authors describe basic usage syntax for inline
assembly (inline asm) embedded within C and C++ programs. Then they
explain intermediate concepts, such as addressing modes, the
clobbers list, and branching stanzas, as well as more advanced
topics, such as memory clobbers, the volatile attribute, and locks
are discussed for those who want to use inline asm in multithreaded
applications.
Outdated design work products are a big challenge in development and maintenance phase. This article shows how we can generate design work products from IBM Rational Software Architect design models by using Eclipse provided Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT). This allows the modeling team to focus more on designing the models rather than producing the work products. The generation of work products is as easy as clicking a button, once the BIRT report has been authored.
First, the authors describe basic usage syntax for inline
assembly (inline asm) embedded within C and C++ programs. Then they
explain intermediate concepts, such as addressing modes, the
clobbers list, and branching stanzas, as well as more advanced
topics, such as memory clobbers, the volatile attribute, and locks
are discussed for those who want to use inline asm in multithreaded
applications.
Part 3 shows you how to configure the IBM CICS Transaction Gateway (CTG) to communicate with IBM TXSeries for Multiplatforms software, and then how to create a client project in IBM Rational Developer for Power Systems Software and test your application using the CTG.
IBM Rational Directory Server can interact with an existing corporate LDAP server
when it is integrated with Rational Focal Point. You can then create LDAP-enabled users
in Focal Point. Rational Directory Server is not something that you would normally need
to leave running in your environment, but is used to configure the corporate partition
that gives Focal Point access to LDAP Server for user authentication.
To develop a useful enterprise architecture (EA) it is important to first
understand the questions you want to answer with your architecture. Then based on these
questions, you can develop an approach and identify the models that you need. Finally,
you can do both quantitative and qualitative analysis on your architecture to either see
where the business can be improved or identify necessary changes or enhancements to the
architecture. This article offers a summary of an enterprise architecture program and
its processes.
In Part 2 of this three-part tutorial, you use the IBM Rational Developer for Power Systems Software configurations from Part 1 to create a new AIX COBOL project and an AIX COBOL program file. Code for a sample CICS application and a sample Makefile file is included.
Waterfall development has a reputation in the software industry for not being able
to handle rapidly changing requirements, which is becoming more obvious in
state-of-the-art software development. However, in some areas such as hardware
development, waterfall is still the more popular development method. In this article, we
introduce challenges and best practices on how to run such projects through agile
development by using IBM Rational Team Concert.
Mike Perrow, a Rational software manager, explains how Rational software and services can help you
attain and sustain what IBM calls "Business Agility:" better decisions through analytics and business rules,
a smarter approach to the process of software delivery, and ways to extend your reach with secure,
multi-platform and cloud development. He cites relevant features and their significance and benefits in
these products, among others: IBM Rational Asset Manager 7.5.1, Rational Automation Framework 3.0, Rational
Focal Point 6.5, Rational Insight 1.1, Rational Team Concert, Rational System Architect 11.4, plus support
for Open Services Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC), the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle
Management (CLM), and CLM for Agility@Scale.
This series presents techniques for creating models to specify and communicate the
architecture of software-intensive systems. It illustrates the elaboration of the Online
Catering architecture for a fictional company, Yummy Inc. Using an iterative approach,
it describes the key architectural activities that are necessary to specify a
software-intensive system with IBM Rational Software Architect. Part 1 of the series
explained how to create a vision for the architecture during early stages of your
project. In part 2, we describe how the architecture is iteratively refined using
Rational Software Architect. Both articles assume that readers are familiar with
methodologies based on iterative development.
This series presents techniques for creating models to specify and communicate the architecture of software-intensive systems. It illustrates the elaboration of the Online Catering architecture for a fictional company, Yummy Inc. Using an iterative approach, it describes the key architectural activities that are necessary to specify a software-intensive system with IBM Rational Software Architect (RSA). In part 1 of the series, we focus on typical tasks to outline the architecture and to align the technical vision to development needs. Part 2 will describe how the architecture is iteratively refined using RSA. Both articles assume that readers are familiar with methodologies based on iterative development.
IBM Rational Developer for i for SOA Construction (sometimes referred to as RDi
SOA) is a software bundle for IBM System i developers. Because it combines Rational
Developer for Power Systems Software, RPG and COBOL development tools for IBM i (RD
Power) and Rational Business Developer, it offers a complete solution to rapidly extend
existing RPG and COBOL applications to a web or SOA environment. This article describes
a scenario where RDi SOA is used to leverage existing RPG assets and transition to a
services-based approach for delivery of key business functions.
Part 1 of this three-part tutorial introduces IBM TXSeries for Multiplatforms and Rational Developer for Power Systems Software, and then the authors explain how to configure both of these products. They also describe how Rational Developer features make CICS application development for TXSeries easier.
This article describes a new approach to security, with the software development
and software quality assurance teams working together to be exponentially more
effective. It explains how quality assurance processes can help IT be more secure and
how IT security can help secure the test environment more efficiently. Readers will also
learn how to incorporate security testing better into the software development life
cycle.
Industry solutions usually involve complex, distributed
deployment with a manual approach that is often time-consuming and
unreliable. Learn how to reduce the complexity and
cost of industry solution deployment through reuse and automation. The
accelerated approach can benefit development and test teams, and can increase
the customer's use of the solution. Best practices and an
example scenario are included.
One of the challenges for many agile software development teams is to ensure that their unit tests cover most of the code. This is critical in ensuring that they create as few defects as possible and that the code can be refactored. Therefore, one of the key metrics (other than all tests passing) is the amount of code that has been covered. Starting in version 8.0.3 of Rational Application Developer, you can configure IBM Rational Application Developer and integrate it with IBM Rational Team Concert to run your tests and check code coverage before allowing the code to be delivered. This article walks you through how to set up this precondition, called the Code Coverage Advisor, and shows how you can use it to increase the coverage of code tested in your projects.
This article describes the first iteration of the Banking Process
Models, now available in a BPMN 2.0-compliant format in both IBM Business Process Manager V7.5 and Rational
Software Architect V8.0.3. You'll learn how to import the models into
both tools and what extensions you can make to these analysis-level processes
in each environment. You'll also find out about future strategic
BPM and SOA objectives around using the models to accelerate the development
of an Operational Process Model (OPM) to directly support the banking sector
in terms of their implementation strategies.
This is developerWorks' 12th anniversary, so we're celebrating by giving you 12 gifts. There's even a gift registry, so you can request what you want if you don't find it in any of these packages.
Software development teams must undertake activities such as breaking down a development project into manageable tasks, creating and changing source code, communicating with fellow developers, and managing teams. IBM Rational Team Concert collaborative project management software supports many such engineering activities and thus can form the cornerstone of software development projects. This two-part tutorial describes some of the major concepts of Rational Team Concert, such as work items, teams, source control, and iteration plans, and how these concepts can be used in developing a small software project using an agile process in a class setting.
Software development teams must undertake activities such as breaking down a development project into manageable tasks, creating and changing source code, communicating with fellow developers, and managing teams. IBM Rational Team Concert collaborative project management software supports many such engineering activities and thus can form the cornerstone of software development projects. This two-part tutorial describes some of the major concepts of Rational Team Concert, such as work items, teams, source control, and iteration plans, and how these concepts can be used in developing a small software project using an agile process in a class setting.
You can customize or add entirely new work items in IBM Rational Team Concert
project management tools to fit your team's needs. The team in this example uses agile
development methods and the scrum process. Their recent experience shows quite a few
regressions, which indicates that they need to ensure that any defect fix is thoroughly
tested. Therefore, they need to associate an attribute with the Defect type of work
item, and the value of this attribute should be based on team members' roles to make
sure that only testing team members can be assigned. This article explains how to create
a new role-based value set and associate it with a Defect type of custom work item
created in Part 1, using the Rational Team Concert Eclipse client rather than the web
client.
Most businesses are interested in finding new ways to drive traffic and generate revenue from their online investments. One way to address this challenge is to use a recommendation engine, which can drive visitors to your web site to explore further offerings. These engines apply a variety of patterns and analyze user habits to offer recommendations to users, and can be helpful in presenting offerings that a user might not otherwise know about. This article explains how to integrate Apache Mahout, an open source recommendation engine, with IBM WebSphere Application Server V8.0 and IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software V8.0.3.
IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition is a free, lightweight server that you
can use to rapidly develop and debug Java applications in Rational Application Developer. If you
use the community edition server and its adaptor, you can eventually migrate your applications to
a WebSphere Application Server in a production environment to leverage its high availability and
robust features afterwards. This article focuses on how to use WebSphere Application Server
Community Edition 3.0 with Rational Application Developer 8.0.3.
In this second article of our series, we examine the effects of non-functional requirements that occur simultaneously to identify the stress cases for a system. Further, we show how Rational Quality Manager can greatly improve this process by establishing and tracking relationships among requirements, test environments, and test cases.
In IBM Rational Team Concert , you have access to the feature-rich Jazz source control management (SCM) system that is subtly different from other such systems that are available in the marketplace. This article provides an overview of the various components that comprise the SCM system and offers both basic and detailed operational overviews on how you can use it.
Many software applications that support multiple platforms provide console
interfaces. A quality assurance engineer or software tester always needs to use the
console by typing on a terminal emulator keyboard. The IBM Rational Functional Tester
Extension for Terminal-based Applications helps you create test scripts to automate host
application test cases. This article explains how to use this tool, so you can make
terminal-based application testing not only easier but automatic.
After you have installed IBM Rational DOORS Web Access requirements management software, this article will guide you through configuring the multiple tiers of the application. Then it explains how to scale the components to balance larger loads as your business needs increase.
IBM Rational Focal Point project, product, and product portfolio management
software is highly suitable for any type of workflow-based management. This article
describes how to customize it to create a bid management (proposal management) system to
increase your efficiency and success rates.
IBM ILOG Dojo Diagrammer is a set of components and services
for creating interactive diagram displays for the web. These step-by
step instructions take you through using it to create a web
application that displays an organization chart, as an example. You
will use IBM Rational Application Developer and the IBM WebSphere
Application Server Feature Pack for Web 2.0 and Mobile, which
includes the Dojo Diagrammer.
The Rational build utility feature is a scriptable tool that you can use to automate builds of projects that you create with IBM Rational Application Developer. It is a subset of Rational Application Developer and available also by default within the product. This article serves as an introductory guide to the tool, complete with a tutorial to help you get started.
Moving from a DDS to SQL database on DB2 for i can be accomplished without changing a single line of program code or recompiling a program. In this article I will describe how to use Rational Open Access: RPG Edition to take advantage of advanced data centric programming techniques only available via SQL programming.
This article explains how IBM Rational Developer for i5/OS for SOA Construction can help you leverage your existing RPG assets to transition to a more flexible application architecture to support your business needs.
By using streams for stages of development, IBM Rational Team Concert can provide
a complete parallel development and release structure for a software development team.
This article covers the delivery of units of work from one stream to another and the
management of releases and emergency fixes, as well as how to control who can deliver
changes to specific streams. It will help you if you are new to Rational Team Concert or
want to improve your approach to parallel development.
From this article, you will learn how to write an adaptor to integrate
the Mercurial distributed version control tool with IBM Rational Build Forge
build and release management software, how to parse and extract the detail
information into the Bill of Materials, or BOM, and how to determine whether
there are new changesets coming.
Find out what the technical support that you get when you license Rational
software includes and doesn't, plus what to do before you call tech support. This
article even includes a handy chart to help you determine the business impact and
severity or your issue.
This article describes the element conversion feature introduced in IBM Rational
Software Architect Version 8.0.2. Especially in early phases of design, it is not clear
exactly which modeling element to use, so you might use a UML class and later realize
that you need a UML component, instead. To change it, you previously had to manually
perform several steps to replace one element with another. The new element conversion
feature automates all of those steps, so you save your time and reduce the chance of
making mistakes associated with manual processing.
The deployment architecture tools found in the IBM Rational Software Architect
Versions 7.5 and 8.0 include modeling elements for a variety of technology areas, such
as databases, application servers, and Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) applications. These
elements are often enough to model any type of computer system or software deployment,
but if you use an area of technology where specific modeling elements are not provided,
you might want to create custom units and capabilities. This tutorial demonstrates how
to create custom units and capabilities that you can use to model the components of any
area of information technology, using the Topology Domain Generation Toolkit.
Validators enforce conditions on a model element in a topology, create an error
message in the diagram, and suggest an optional resolution to correct the condition.
This tutorial describes how you can add a custom validator to IBM Rational Software
Architect.
Many companies hire consultants to set up an enterprise architecture (EA) or to
provide best practices. These engagements are not always successful. This article offers
practical tips based on real-world experiences to help organizations achieve a more
successful experience with consultants, and realize the true value of their
investment.
In this world of service-driven business applications, it is very important that various components of a complex system can easily access enterprise information system (EIS) functionality. Improved Java EE connector tools in IBM Rational Application Developer 8.0 make it easier for you to generate a J2C bean that provides better access. This step-by-step guide demonstrates a quick way to create a simple JavaServer Page that uses the J2C bean to access the SAP server functions.
This is the second part of a two-part article. It demonstrates how to use Java EE connector tools in IBM Rational Application Developer 8.0 to generate a J2C bean in a Java EE application to communicate with a SAP server that is running at the back end of an enterprise information system.
Find out about the new functions and benefits available with IBM Rational Host
Access Transformation Services (HATS) Version 8 (to be released 12 August 2011): Web 2.0
functions and new web page templates, RESTful services, Dojo widgets; support for the
latest portlet standard and enhancements to various HATS portlet functions; extended
mobile device support; ease-of-use improvements; and bidirectional language support for
Arabic are among the topics covered in this article.
When you know some of the different levels of debugging techniques to analyze any runtime problems in IBM Rational Change enterprise change management. software, you might resolve the issue yourself without calling tech support. Even if you do have to call, you’ll be better prepared and save considerable time, because Level 3 support engineers often ask you to add or edit configuration settings. So either way, you’re likely to save time and avoid frustration.
Tools are most effective when used to assist semiautonomous developers to design,
create, test, and deploy horizontal, end-to-end component solutions. Instead, we're
expecting them to use tools to attempt to corral a multitude of vertical resources
working in various disciplines.
You can customize or add entirely new work items in IBM Rational Team Concert project management tools to fit your team's needs. The team in this example uses agile development methods and the scrum process. Their project is highly dynamic, so they need to closely monitor potential risks. In following this article, you will create and test a fully functional, new type of work item called Risk, using the Rational Team Concert Eclipse client, rather than the web client. Thereafter, because there is a an additional type of work item added to the project called Risk, you can create and track more types of Risk work items using Rational Team Concert.
One of the developers of the Rational Design Management option offers tips and tricks for setting up the IBM Rational Design Management Server with the IBM Rational Software Architect Design Manager Server Extension and using both with either the web client, which is installed automatically with the server, or the thick client, called the IBM Rational Software Architect Design Manager Client Extension. The thick client is installed into the same package group as an existing IBM Rational Software Architect installation. The first part of the article, Set up the server, is intended for server administrators, while the second and third parts of the article, about using the web client and the Rational Software Architect client, are intended for users.
IBM Rational DOORS for HP Quality Center Interface, Version 3.5, helps you
synchronize Rational requirements data and HP testing process data. This article tells
you how to install and configure the interface.
By implementing workspaces, you can model multiple versions of an architecture in IBM
Rational System Architect. This article explains the different versions that can be created for
the following scenarios, along with the benefits for each: implementing an enterprise
architecture, implementing an as-is and to-be architecture, integrating a system of system
architecture, and trade-off analysis. It also describes four software tools that can analyze
workspaces.
Follow these steps to configure IBM Rational Change to run in
Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) mode. All of the
configuration changes required in the application, the Java Runtime
Environment (JRE), and the web server are including in the code
provided in this article.
Get an overview of how to set up multiple IBM Rational Team Concert applications by using
IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment profiles. This article provides systematic
instructions to get an SSL certificate, and then how to install and configure it on each of the
application server profiles created on the Version 6.1 or 7.0 of the application server to provide
secure access for multiple Rational Team Concert instances.
With the increase in use of the IBM Rational Performance Tester tool for performance testing of diversified protocols and large-volume load simulations, one of the major challenges is in setting parameters for the test data at run time. This is primarily because of the volume of test data involved, both in terms of the number of types of test data and the amount of test data involved for each type. The amount of data often spans to millions of rows. Reading that data at run time involves very intensive I/O activity. This article describes ways to optimize test data parameters to for lower use of operating system resources and to drive more loads through the testing software. This leads to successful performance tests even with large volumes of test data and request generation activities.
Many developers use IBM Rational Build Forge to handle software builds through its management console. But it also has includes an excellent set of command line Java and Perl APIs. Plus, it integrates with Jazz technology-based software which can provides a complete and integrated set of test, build, change and release management tools. This article explains how, complete with sample code.
Although the practice of software development subcontracting is starting to be very common today, there is not yet a clear definition of different standards and tools used, and there is not a specific identification of new risks that might arise when changing to this development model. This article analyzes business motivators and new concerns that companies face when they move to this model, and then explains how software that runs on top of IBM Rational Jazz technology can help to implement a collaborative framework to manage work with external providers of services.
Learn how to create Java Persistence Architecture (JPA) entities that are built
from pre-existing relational tables, that use database-generated primary key values, and
are part of a composition (or aggregation) of one or more other JPA entity beans. You
will use Rational Application Developer tools to rapidly generate and customize JPA
entities from a Derby database with tables that use the Identity Value Generation
capability. Using the views and editors increases your productivity by freeing you from
hand coding the required annotations.