Welcome to this IBM Rational Podcast. I'm. Angelique Matheny. Joining me for this podcast, Accelerating Software Delivery in Subversion Environments

Transcription

1 Welcome to this IBM Rational Podcast. I'm Angelique Matheny. Joining me for this podcast, Accelerating Software Delivery in Subversion Environments Using Rational Team Concert, ClearQuest, ClearCase and Build Forge, is Paul Boustany. Paul is a Change and Release Management Marketing Engineer with IBM Rational Software. He has eight years' experience with configuration management and 10 years' experience in the software development industry. As software development continues to become increasingly distributed, the environments that we work in become more disparate and varied. Software development teams need tools that embrace the new global standards. They also need tools that can both leverage existing investments in the enterprise while be flexible enough to support Agile teams. IBM Rational Team Concert -- the first ever tool from IBM Rational built from the ground up on the new Jazz technology with team collaboration and Agile disciplines in mind. In today's podcast we will learn how Rational Team Concert can unify previously silo'ed development environments of varying sizes that include Subversion, IBM Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest and Rational Build Forge. We've got a lot to cover today so let's get started. Paul, -1-

2 welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Angelique. Let's start by talking generally about change and release management. What can you say are the core requirements companies should hope a change and release management solution addresses? So, in concept, change and release management should be relatively simple. If you look at the various needs from various roles within an organization, they're mostly straightforward and pretty easily defined. So each level of an organization has typical needs and requirements to be successful in their role. From the top, the CIO level is typically concerned about cost and really just getting the job done. You know, getting a quality product out the door on time and on budget. Whereas, a project manager needs to have more visibility in order to understand real-time status of a project, to be able to have some control over it especially if they're concerned with managing distributed teams. And then finally, developers who are mostly focused on just getting work done. They want to complete their work quickly and effectively without being hindered by their tools or -2-

3 their process. So what are the barriers companies face to achieving that? Well, there's definitely an evolution in software delivery. The things that force process maturity are technical and business drivers such as application complexity, size of the team, compliance mandates, teams being distributed throughout the globe, et cetera. So all these things drive the need for a more evolved and complete configuration management solution. Well, Paul, what does that solution look like? Well, it's typical to start with a solution that is manual and non repeatable, or fairly basic, essentially. The need for more complete solutions become evident due to the increase in errors that come from manual process, the decrease in quality, missing deadlines and an overall lack of efficiency on...for the whole team. So by using integrated change and release management solutions, you're able to associate changes to software code with development activities as well as getting awareness into what is it that you've built so it can be reproduced at any time, which eventually speeds up the time to defect detection and eventual resolution. -3-

4 Okay, you just mentioned a complete C&RM solution. So how would you describe a complete solution? Well, I would describe, it involves...or a complete C&RM solution, or Change and Release Management solution, is one that increases quality and team productivity. Now, the value of this type of approach and/or essentially of a collaborative lifecycle management approach, is huge. Teams are essentially able to seamlessly gain access to software requirements and change management, all allowing you to develop in Agile ways while still having a robust enterprise environment. Paul, we hear a lot about Agile. What is so important about being Agile? It's true, we do hear quite a lot about it, and it's one of the major buzzwords of the industry today. And essentially we hear so much about it because organizations today are putting more thought into their strategic directions, basically because software has a greater impact on their business. Companies are also facing increased pressure to deliver -4-

5 innovation at a faster pace in order to stay competitive. So in order to meet all these requirements, teams are looking to be more agile or essentially more responsive to change. They also need to connect all of these moving parts that they have in place not only in local environments but in globally distributed environments as well. So all of this coupling with cost effectiveness is one of the drivers why teams are striving for agile methodologies as well as for Application Lifecycle Management -- or, ALM. Companies know essentially where they want to be, but the path to get there isn't always clear. You mentioned Application Lifecycle Management. Can you define what you mean by ALM? Sure. Simply, ALM has been defined as three core things: traceability, process automation and project visibility. Without these capabilities, the quality of the software delivered ultimately suffers. Teams are more inefficient, and the project delivery and delivery schedule is unreliable. So, ALM seems crucial to successful software delivery. How does Rational C&RM solution address these core needs? -5-

6 ALM is very much crucial to this. So at the root of the issues that we are defining in successful ALM, the root of many of these issues are related to lack of complete Software Configuration Management. And there are many reasons why companies have incomplete SCM solutions. So, let me set the stage a little bit along those lines. First off, many development teams have environments in which they're using multiple SCM -- or, Software Configuration Management -- systems, things like Subversion, Perforce, even Rational ClearCase, or some Open Source tools like CBS. So they have these multiple SCM systems as a result of several factors. It could be due to decentralized purchase or decision making, so you've got people in various groups in the organization that are making decisions for their individual teams, and they decide which vendor to use for various reasons... Or you have diverse teams that necessitate different approaches -- there's another reason why people would have various spenders. And the third would be acquisitions or outsourcing. So oftentimes companies acquire...larger companies acquire smaller companies. They wind up with preexisting tools that they have made a large investment in so they don't want to bother retraining or going forward -6-

7 with a different vendor. So when you have these multiple solutions, you're going to find that they may address specific needs of various development teams within the organization, but rarely do these multiple vendors address the needs of the whole group. So teams are looking now at how they can implement a more flexible approach that meets the needs of all of their teams -- the small teams, the large teams, the in between teams -- that are also exploring the best ways to leverage their Open Source technologies without putting unmanageable maintenance and integration burdens on their project team. So it sounds like what we're seeing today is that organizations have multiple SCM solutions and varied requirements for software delivery established by multiple sources. But it looks like there's a huge benefit to teams that can create a unified solution -- one that will manage all the needs across the enterprise. That is absolutely correct. What we are seeing is that teams do in fact want to have an enterprise-wide SCM environment, but the real challenge they're facing is how. Right? So how can we connect all of these different solutions from all these different vendors and still address the needs of disparate and sometimes silo'ed teams within an -7-

8 organization? Plus on top of that there's also the need to track change. Organizations understand the value of having a centralized change management solution, so that there's one source that [can send] visibility into change that's occurring for the various projects. And finally, organizations are striving to achieve a collaborative ALM environment. We talked about it and the benefits of ALM are clear to most organizations -- the benefits of allowing repeated, shared processes, connecting requirements from...all the way from testing for traceability and being able to develop in an agile way within an enterprise environment. So let's take an example of an organization like you have been describing. They want to be able to unify teams for agile development and have access to requirements and change tracking. How can you achieve an enterprise SCM environment that connects all the moving parts for better reliability and visibility into projects? That question brings us to the announcement that we made back in June, and that's our newest offering from IBM Rational Software. And that's a tool called the IBM Rational Team Concert, or RTC. -8-

9 And RTC removes these types of organizational silos by integrating version control -- and that's whether it be Rational ClearCase or Subversion -- integrating that version control, change tracking and build capability. It also tries to transformation how people work together to drive more value from the software they're developing. RTC, what it does is provides a common integrated collaborative development environment for software development teams to kind of help bridge the gap between the various needs of the organization. So you may have heard a lot about IBM's newest technology called Jazz, and RTC is actually the first tool that's leveraging the Jazz technology platform to provide this type of collaborative infrastructure. So the intent behind Rational Team Concert is to have a low-cost collaborative development environment that allows for teams to be productive and deliver software while still using and leveraging their existing investments in tools like Rational ClearCase, Rational ClearQuest, Rational Build Forge, and even some non Rational tools like Subversion. So back to agile again. How does Rational Team Concert support agile teams? -9-

10 Well, so looking back to what are the core of agile principles, you can see that Rational Team Concert provides support for and addresses essentially each one of these things. It allows for continuous integration. It's very change driven and integrated, making it completely traceable while it supports teams' awareness and the ad hoc sharing of changes. Also Rational Team Concert has greater flexibility so that teams can easily respond to change, and finally allow for customer collaboration including the approvals of changes and a view of overall project status. Paul, can you describe a bit more how Rational ClearCase and Subversion work with Rational Team Concert? Certainly. We've been talking a lot about this trend of organizations who use multiple SCM vendors. Of course, this adds complexity of how to manage the environment and how these tools coexist. So that's where the automation and process flow control that Rational Team Concert technology provides. The hand offs between the teams that are working in various environments are very smooth and immediate. -10-

11 They're built into the product out of the boxes. The Rational Team Concert Bridge to Subversion environments as well as the Rational Team Concert Connectors to ClearCase environments. And so by bridging these various tools together, we're effectively removing the barriers and providing information to all team members in real time. In our typical example where both Rational ClearCase and Subversion are being used by development teams, through the use of the Rational Team Concert ClearCase Connectors and the Rational Team Concert Subversion Bridge, we can connect these two solutions -- or really, these three solutions -- to achieve enterprise class SCM solutions which gives us access to our source code in all of the various repositories... But it also gives us the benefits, the additional benefits, of shared common build and release process, integrated testing regimes, and other best practices so that we can avoid duplicating effort and distribute and share our workload where needed. So RTC, in addition to all that, also gives development teams real-time notifications and error logs with intelligent filters so that people can troubleshoot problems -11-

12 quickly. So what we're doing is we're creating an extremely collaborative and responsive development environment. We're trying to take out the human bottlenecks so that teams can really work together at their peak efficiency while still using all of these existing SCM solutions. For teams that are already using Rational ClearCase, for example, there's a seamless interoperation with Rational Team Concert using something called the ClearCase Synchronized Streams. So what this does is it gives teams working in RTC, gives them access to Eclipse projects that are under ClearCase source control, and they can deliver changes that are made in RTC back to ClearCase, or forward from ClearCase to RTC. So using the synchronized streams, you get bidirectional access between ClearCase and RTC. For teams that are also using Subversion or maybe exclusively using Subversion, they can use the RTC Bridge, which gets them into the Jazz environment while all of their artifacts are still being managed and still being...or, still hosted, rather, in the external subversion repository. So basically by using Rational Team Concert kind of at the -12-

13 center of these different environments, you gain interoperation with these multiple SCM tools along with the capability of integrating requirements, quality and the rest of the change and release management products. So this gives any type of team, be it small agile teams or midsized teams, the capability to continue to work and be supported within a larger enterprise environment. Thanks, Paul. That really sounds great. Rational Team Concert sounds like it will be an extremely useful tool for all types of software development teams with varied needs. So the first thing I think people are going to want to know is, where can people go and learn more about Rational Team Concert? Well, so far we've got a trial version of RTC available on the developerworks download page -- so, if you point your browser to ibm.com/developerworks/downloads, and then navigate through to the Rational section. Rational Team Concert should be right there on the front page. So that trial version allows you to download and evaluate a full version of RTC. But actually RTC is also available in a totally free edition called the Rational Team Concert Express C. And you can get that on Jazz.net, and just point your browser to -13-

14 and you can start using RTC Express C for free today. Paul, thank you so much for taking time out to discuss Accelerating Software Delivery in Subversion Environments using Rational Team Concert, ClearCase, ClearQuest and Build Forge. Integrating and having it all work together. We really appreciate it. No problem. Thanks for having me, Angelique. That was Paul Boustany, Change and Release Management Marketing Engineer with IBM Rational Software. If you are interested in more podcasts like this one, check out the Rational Talks to You Podcast Page at This has been an IBM Rational Podcast. I'm Angelique Matheny. Thanks for listening. Keep tuning in as Rational Talks to You. [END OF SEGMENT] -14-