IBM Rational is an open software development platform that supports sharing and interactions among software and systems design and development teams. Recently, I spoke with Gina Poole, Vice President, Marketing, IBM Rational. Gina has been with IBM for over 25 years. She began as a developer and has moved through strategy and operations. Before her current assignment she led the IBM Worldwide University Relations and Innovation Program.
Gina began by noting that software development is a very social business and collaborative is key for success. It enables innovation, reduces risks, and drives down costs. I agree completely and it is the basis for the current forms of software development, such as Agile. To enable this collaboration on a continuous and comprehensive basis, Rational supports the entire software lifecycle. In the past the development life cycle was often disconnected and supported by siloed tool sets. Now Rational enables the integration of both people and tools across the entire lifecycle.
The integration of collaboration capabilities within the development tool set is aligned with IBM’s focus on integrating social business tools with work processes that I saw presented at Lotussphere this year. I agree with this move and think it is essential for enterprise 2.0 to become more than simply using disconnected Web 2.0 tools within the enterprise. Gina noted that this integration helps break down barriers because conversations are held within the common tool set. One group can easily pick up where another left off. This is especially important with global teams collaborating around the clock. It can also bring products to market faster. This collaboration can also occur beyond the enterprise. IBM DeveloperWorks has over 8 million members with over 4 million in action in any given month.
Rational offers products that leverage Jazz, IBM's open software development platform. Jazz.net is a community and online venue for open commercial development of Jazz-based products. It is a scalable, extensible team collaboration platform build using open specifications from the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration community (OSLC). OSLC is an open community that is seeking to standardize the way tools share information such as requirements, tests, work items, change requests and designs with one another. Here are some of the components of Rational
Collaborative Design Management: Enables teams to integrate designs seamlessly with other development tasks and information, such as requirements, code, and quality management assets. This is achieved through a central design hub where designs can be stored, maintained, and referenced for future reuse, documentation and compliance.
Collaborative Lifecycle Management: Encourages cross-functional collaboration. It brings together IBM Rational Requirements Composer, IBM Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational Quality Manager in a unified development platform. New integrations between IBM Connections social networking software for business and IBM Rational Team Concert allow software developers to use social networking to find experts within an organization and help collaborate with stakeholders on software development projects.
Collaborative Development and Operations: Enables organizations to reduce reworking projects through standardized processes and allows automation for deploying software. Existing development assets can be reused, regardless of whether they reside on the cloud or on-site servers. To improve the identification and remediation of potential problems and issues, IBM has developed an OSLC-based integration between the IT operations ticketing system, Tivoli Service Request Manager, and the development team solution, Rational Team Concert.
We next discussed Agile, which was first created to support co-located teams. Gina mentioned a successful experiment that looked at the use of Agile by distributed teams. Five university students from the US (Pace University), India (University of Delhi) and Senegal (Ecole Supérieure Polytechnique), the students used the IBM Rational Jazz community to build the mobile application and implement it in the classroom. The result of 9 weeks effort was “Target First Grade,” an application aimed to help school children in Senegal practice their math, reading and writing skills on a mobile device, with the results of each lesson being texted to both the instructor and parents. Here are several screen shots of the application.
Here is a paper describing the project in more detail, Transitioning to Distributed Development in Students’ Global Software Development Projects. This effort has been expanded into the IBM Software for a Cause Program and a great service. I like what they are doing with Rational. It is a great example of putting social software to work by integrating it with work process and initiatives.
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