The Process Practice

An update release to RMC 7.5 was announced today. Find out about the details here.

The Open Group released the TOGAF 9 specification, which now includes an official EPF Composer Method Plug-in. Go to this article on ZDNet to learn about all the details.

The RMC team released ifix2 for Rational Method Composer 7.5 today. Use IBM Installation Manager to download and install the update.

The most important addition in this release is the inclusion of translations of the IBM Practices to German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean. Contact tech support or your local tech rep to find out how to get these new translations. In addition to the translations the update fixes a number of minor bugs around variability, spell-check, inconsistencies when publishing, and WBM export. See the readme in the installation directory after the update for the complete list. Plus, it ships with the RAM client for version 7.1.1, which allows you to connect to the latest RAM server version.

[updated 03/25]

Our friends from Noblestar organized another public event in Costa Mesa, CA where we present overviews to all of Rational’s Jazz-based products and of course RMC. Rational’s CTO Martin Nally will be there as well as many product managers and top experts of the products presented. See the annoucement below and if you are in the area on March 2nd you can sign up for it here.

IBM Rational

proudly presents
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
The Jazz Ensemble
Live at Carnegie Hall

IBM FileNet Office
Carnegie Hall
3545 Harbor Boulevard
Costa Mesa, CA 92626-1437

“The Jazz platform is a new technology initiative from Rational that allows the people, data and processes of software development to be integrated more tightly at the same time that software teams become more complex and distributed. Innovative and modern, the Jazz architecture is designed to integrate existing tools as well as enable new tools we could not implement before. Learn how the Jazz platform, the Jazz integration architecture and Jazz products can improve collaboration, transparency and automation of software development.” – Martin Nally, IBM Fellow, CTO, IBM Rational

Sponsored by IBM, Noblestar, Global Rational User Group Community.

The experimental incubator that allows you to generate process templates for Rational Team Concerts that I had announced here for RMC 7.2 and RTC 1.0 has now been updated to support Team Concert version 1.0.1 and Method Composer 7.5ifix1. Go here on jazz.net to download the updated bits. I also updated the tutorial here on IBM’s DeveloperWorks that describes the integration. One important enhancement to this new version of the integration is the ability to provide as many default templates as you want now (see Advanced Usage sections in the tutorial for how to create and manage these).

The “Method Authoring Method” is a collection of practices, method content, and processes created with Rational Method Composer that describe how to develop all of these things with RMC. In other words and as a the name says it already: it provides methods for doing methods. This collection of practices covers topic areas that range from ways of eliciting and sketching methods, over how to use RMC to model processes, to a reference process model architecture for managing interchangeable sets of practices and process on a very large scale.

We now offer different packages and pre-published configurations of this content for different audiences:

1. First of all there is an open source version of this content on the Eclipse Process Framework homepage that focuses on the scope of the open source practices of the Eclipse Process Framework.  Download it here and preview it here on EPF Wiki.
2. Then there are two extended versions of this content focusing on the additional capabilities of Rational Method Composer and the way IBM’s commercial practices content is organized. They require an IBM Rational Method Composer license and can be downloaded from IBM’s DeveloperWorks here.

I created a 48 min. demo video based on a client request that shows how teams can get started collaboratively developing their method plug-ins in Rational Method Composer using Rational ClearCase. It is intended for advanced RMC users and shows how to

• mix content from various sources in Method Composer by utilizing workspace libraries (local IBM content and shared plug-ins in ClearCase)

• manage versions of Method Composer plug-ins in ClearCase

• perform parallel method development work with ClearCase

The demo shown comprises of the following steps:

1. Create a VOB (versioned object base) on the ClearCase server
2. Convert the out-of-the-box method library to a workspace library
3. Create your own method plug-in
4. Create a ClearCase view from within in Method Composer
5. Share your method plug-in in ClearCase
6. How team members check-out and work with method plug-ins and method element

Click here to start the video. It requires that you have the Adobe Flash Player installed for your browser.

We released the first bug fix release for IBM Rational Method Composer 7.5 last night. Go and get it by running IBM Installation Manager and clicking the Update button. After the install you can find a list with all the issues addressed in the Readme file inside the installation directory. This ifix does not only fix the tool, but also a few issues in the Practices method library and published configurations. Therefore, the download is a bit larger than normal.

Key changes are:

• Converting the practice library to a workspace library now also converts tags and process builder definition files
• We improved the presentation of Practice guidance pages in both skins (updated the Relationships table, cleaned up the string resources used)
• Added a few more string resources in the skins files (such as the types of elements used in rich text hyperlinks or the relationship sub-folder in the navigation tree)
• Some fixes for the ClearCase integration (renaming plug-ins in workspace libraries, fixed new Clean Resources function when using CC)
• Work product descriptor pages now show sub-artifacts when including their method content
• Method content element guidance is not replicated to its descriptors anymore: RMC now enforces that a descriptor only lists additional guidance references in respect to the linked method element and does not duplicate such guidance entries during synchronization anymore
• Refined our double-byte character support in URLs (RMC now distinguishes signs like spaces and plus signs from double-byte codes in urls that start with %20)
• Added the missing “supporting plug-in” flags in Practice library and republished all out-of-the-box Practices configurations
• Spell checker fixed for RMC on Linux operation systems

Note, that we also made fixes and improvements for both skins. So if you have your own skins defined make sure you merge in all our changes into your skin files using a compare-merge tool.

IBM’s DeveloperWorks now features a landing page that introduces IBM’s Development Practices at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/practices/.

This page provides an overview  to practices and links to one page summaries for 14 practices with links to resources and references. Needless to say that all of these practices are available as fully modeled, documented, and reusable practices in IBM Rational Method Composer 7.5, which currently ships with altogether 21 practices. You can use Method Composer to assemble and publish the right set of practices that you would like to implement as well as use the tool to customize and extend each practice to represent your exact way of working.

If you are an experienced RMC user and want to see a quick overview to what is new and noteworthy in Rational Method Composer 7.5 then check out this new page. If you are new to RMC make sure to also review some of the overview material listed on the Resources page. Check back here for more upcoming collateral for RMC 7.5 and Practices.