IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials: Improve your team productivity with Integrated Process, Planning, and Collaboration using Team Concert Enterprise Edition

Increasing globalization has brought a few changes in the software development industry. One of them is "off shoring" either part of the system or whole modules. Off shoring is chosen for obvious reasons such as business cost effectiveness, availability of talent pool, and other strategic reasons. Off shoring has led to global software development teams with members from at least two geographical regions collaborating on the same project.

A team based on the same culture often has many common things to share and communicate informally compared to the teams spanning multiple cultures. Time zone difference, geographical distance, language, and cultural barriers create more information and psychological gaps in the project.

The co-located teams have the advantage that they have a line of sight, which helps them have informal discussions and thereby understand each other well. In the case of the geographically distributed teams, there is a possibility of misunderstanding created by communication. The tone of the language, and the choice of the words used in written or verbal communication, largely depend on the culture that one belongs to.

In practice, team members get information necessary to perform their tasks largely from peers, as opposed to formal, documented sources. To be able to tap this social resource, team members need to build social capital, meaning that they need to establish trust relationships with their peers.

This process of building trust does not occur so readily in a globally distributed team, sometimes leading to problems in the collaboration process. Informal collaboration tools, coupled with appropriate management practices, are an important part of the solution.

The act of working jointly in a co-operative manner to achieve a piece of a task is collaboration and it can happen in a formal or informal way. In the formal way of collaboration, typically the project manager or team leader assigns a "contact person" for any kind of questions or issues to answer. In the informal way of collaboration, team members work together at lunch or over a cup of coffee.

The proliferation of several technological advancements such as Web 2.0, Service Oriented Architecture, Mashups, Software as a Service, Cloud Computing, and many others made teams depend on each other for expertise and carry out the knowledge management in a collaborative manner.

Due to the nature of the cultures and backgrounds, formal or/and the informal way of communication is preferred one over the other. Convergence of the collaboration tools into the software development tool was needed to solve the collaboration problems. Collaboration tools offer much more than the basic communication channels provided by e-mail and telephones. These tools can make team members aware of each other. After team members are aware of each other, they are then able to communicate and work together to achieve common goals.

Collaboration is supported through tools that allow communication, knowledge sharing, and analysis. Tools such as blogs, Wikis, bulletin boards, and instant messaging clients are a few collaborative tools used now. An interesting side effect of informal knowledge sharing tools, such as blogs and Wikis, is that they increase awareness. When people read blogs, they can learn more about the authors and their interests. In this way, even if two people are in a totally different geographical area, they may know a lot of each other from the social collaboration and communication tools.

With the global teams in place, pressure to achieve higher team productivity makes team management even more challenging.

With conventional software development, you spend a lot of effort setting up the development environment, setting up source code repository, getting the role-based access rights, and other infrastructure-related tasks. You typically connect to a requirements and/or issue management tool so that you can view assigned tasks and requirements to fulfill. In the worst case scenario, teams maintain a shared spreadsheet where they could see the assigned tasks on a weekly or monthly basis. Collaboration is typically done through casual discussions or e-mails. Source code management and requirements are often disconnected and it's difficult to connect or trace the requirements, source code, versions, and builds. Continuous integration builds are achieved with disparate systems, which might prove difficult to integrate into the development environment.

With Eclipse's success using the best practices tailored and adapted from various agile methodologies, the focus moved from individual productivity to team productivity. The central idea, "Build process into the tools and make tools aware of the team", gave the team the power to collectively collaborate and focus on the real job.

The Jazz platform got its name from the inspiration of a team of artists playing Jazz on a brightly lit platform. The Jazz orchestra team is visible to everyone and the audience knows who is doing what. Each member of the team has a complete understanding of one's own responsibility and that of the other team members. They work in a co-ordinated way to generate great music.

The Jazz platform has team collaboration, process awareness, transparency, and customization as its fundamental building blocks. Traditionally, software development tools were designed in a way that the focus is on development process or on coding productivity. In either case, focusing more on one aspect and ignoring another is not desirable. Instead, Jazz takes the approach to integrate the process into the tools and make the tools aware of the team. By embedding the collaboration tools of the choice, you have the integrated experience where each feature knows the context of the other tool.

Instead of considering the process as monolithic documentation and a set of training slides, the team process is truly integrated into the tools. This helps us concentrate on true innovation and focus on the tasks rather than worrying about the process implementation. It is not uncommon to imagine that the process implementation takes a considerable amount of time to learn and implement in traditional methods.

The amount of time spent by managers to pull the data from numerous sources to put together the status reports and project health charts can be huge. Each time, a report is needed for the higher management, and the manual data collection and report generation can become tricky and erroneous. The Jazz platform tries to solve these problems by unifying and automating the data collection and report process. This enables every one on the team to look at the same data and report at any time. Managers can also leverage the role-based access system so that they can hide the confidential data from certain team members.

To summarize, the Jazz platform takes the integrated approach to focus on collaboration, transparency, and automation. The Jazz initiative is composed of the following key components:

The Jazz platform follows some key aspects of architecture to differentiate itself from the others. The noticeable aspects of the architecture are as follows:

Jazz Team Server (JTS) provides the foundation services or APIs that provide the access to the team, dashboards, security, event notification, search, and collaboration aspects. The JTS is built on the Open Life cycle Service Collaboration (OLSC) platform so that any tool that conform to the OSLC can be easily plugged in. For this, one needs to develop the server integrations on the OLSC layer and all the client integrations are done on the JTS, as shown in the following figure.

Jazz allows the community to develop different tools on the JTS by providing the language-specific libraries for accessing the Jazz APIs with Eclipse, Visual Studio, and Web 2.0 client integrations. This has the advantage that an organization can build the tools of their choice in their choice of technology.

JTS provides open APIs, helping groups of tools to work together. The foundation APIs enable the tools to access the work items, issues, build plans, release plans, and other project artifacts. The beauty of the JTS is to have the multiple physical JTS servers, but still consider it as one logical server, as shown in the next figure:

The Jazz technology platform is developed at jazz.net, where you can register to participate. You can open enhancement requests, projects reports, track schedules, participate in discussion forums, download and play with the Rational Team Concert, and other Jazz-based products.

Rational Team Concert is the first commercial product offering based on the Jazz technology platform. The Rational Team Concert 2.0 is the recent publicly available stable release that offered both Web and Client versions. The Client interface is based on the Eclipse platform and another flavor on Microsoft's Visual Studio. The Web client has a Web 2.0 style interface for the fast access of dashboards and reports.

Team collaboration and productivity is the focus of the Rational Team Concert. This means that the product offers an integration of all the aspects of our daily work, such as coding, plans, tasks, revision control, build management, and reports.

Rational Team Concert integrates with several other products, including IBM and third-party tools. Some of the current offerings are as follows:

Any organization using a variety of tools can adapt the Rational Team Concert and have the infrastructure and functionality provided by the Jazz technology platform and Rational Team Concert. As the third-party offerings increase, we will have more flexibility to use different tools along with Rational Team Concert.

Rational Team Concert gives you the power to collaborate in real-time, direct control of the project plans, build plans, and finally real-time project status reports. Development is a lot more about communication than writing code. It's critical that everyone understand the goals, timelines, and what is expected of them. Developers can update plans, start builds, and configure the team's process. Project managers can see the code, work items, and what is being delivered. Testers can see what is planned in the milestone.

In the following sections, you will see an introduction to the Rational Team Concert features and how they ease your daily tasks.

The increasing complexity of the software requires ensuring the quality product by extensive test plans and test coverage. Rational Quality Manager provides a collaborative environment to create test plans and execute them. The product offers the tracking and traceability of requirements to test cases and metric analysis. As a manager, you can get the impact analysis of how the project is affected by project decisions.

In modern day software development, you can imagine that the requirements are coming from multiple stakeholders and in different formats. It is always challenging for you to integrate these silos of information in a meaningful manner.

Rational Requirements Composer gives you the power to capture the requirements from different stakeholders and transforms the spreadsheets, Word documents, presentations, whiteboard discussions, and online conferences to manageable requirements.

You can leverage the rich editors to create use cases, user stories, user interface mock-ups, process diagrams, and many more. The real value comes when you combine different requirement sources from stakeholders through hyperlinks, tags, and attributes.

Very often you have the project management and program management software disconnected from the team, tasks, and development environments. Rational Project Conductor enables you to plan, schedule, and have a work break down structure. You can attach various artifact types when a work item is being created and the project calendar can be fully customized to reflect the team and location.

Rational Project Conductor allows you to schedule work, assign work items, and view timesheets of the team members. It allows you to import the project plan from the Microsoft project.

For the management, measuring of the progress, identifying the potential problems, and development risks could be daunting. Rational Insight gives you the ability to find the blind spots in the development and mitigate the risks. You can enforce the governance in a globally changing environment.

Rational Build Forge is an integrated approach for the automated builds and release management. You can utilize the existing project infrastructures such as scripts, tools, and development languages to achieve the automation and scheduling.

Maintaining your teams' software, hardware, and business assets in simple spreadsheets or disconnected systems could be very daunting and error prone. Rational Asset Manager lets you manage, define a reuse strategy, and track the asset usage for business and software assets across the enterprise.