The Process Practice

We just released an incubator (an experimental unsupported solution for feedback that you can use at your own risk) for Rational Method Composer and Rational Team Concert users on jazz.net. This incubator provides experimental code that allows generating a Jazz process template based on a process modeled and documented with Rational Method Composer, which is then uploaded along with the published process documentation to the Jazz Team Server. There the process template can be used for creating a project and the published content will be directly available for team members using Rational Team Concert.

Read this tutorial to learn all about it, including where to download and how to set it up: “How to document your team’s processes for IBM Rational Team Concert using IBM Rational Method Composer“.

[Update 10/22: New URL for the tutorial.]

There is a great new paper on Developer Works by my colleague Cécile Péraire that reports on how a group in IBM’s Global Business Services uses RMC to model process for CRM with localized differences. The paper shows a great case study for using variability and method configurations as well as gives recommendation for creating a content architecture and design patterns for solving problems such as variants and optimizing reuse.

Cécile Péraire, "Architecting IBM Global and Local Business Processes using Rational Method Composer", Rational Edge, Summer 2008.

If you are using any of the products listed below you can use the packaged Process Browser to browse your own RMC published content with in these environments. Even better the Process Advisor view that is part of these products can react to specific UI events and propose context-specific content recommendations. For example, if you select a Use Case in a Use-Case Diagram in RSA, Advisor will display work products, tasks, guidelines, tool mentors, checklist etc. relevant to use cases. Find here two articles that provide more background how to use, customize, and even extend this capability:

• Overview article
• How to bundle advisor content

Here the list of products that contain this feature:

Software development

• IBM® Rational® Software Architect
• IBM® Rational® Application Developer
• IBM® Rational® Software Modeler
• IBM® Rational® Systems Developer

Software testing

• IBM® Rational® Performance Tester
• IBM® Rational® Functional Tester
• IBM® Rational® Manual Tester
• IBM® Rational® Funtional Tester Extension

This week I had the honor of presenting our work around SPEM 2, Eclipse Process Framework, and Rational Method Composer at the SEE 2008 Conference (Software and Systems Engineering Essential) in Bern. If you are interested to see what this was all about then go here for the abstract and here for the presentation slides.

We released iFix3 for IBM Rational Method Composer 7.2 on Friday. We recommend that all 7.2 users apply this upgrade as it fixes a couple of bugs and even provides some enhancements to existing features that people were urgently asking for. See a summary of the key changes below. As always download and install it by just starting your IBM Installation Manager from your Start menu, clicking the Update button and following the wizard for downloading and installing the patch. After the patch is applied checkout the release notes in the installation directory: “<install_dir>\rmc\readme\readme_ifix3.html“.

The most import changes/fixes:

• Added missing online help sections around Workspace libraries and Birt report design.
• The configuration editor now does not perform a consistency check (that would result in info, warning, and error messages in the Problem view) every time you make a change, which was really degrading performance. Now the check is performed only when you save or press the “show configuration errors” button on the top-right of the editor.
• Several additions to the way copying of process resolves variability relationships on activities as well as the underlying method content. For example, if you perform a deep-copy of a pattern or activity to another process that it also performs an automatic synchronize to pick-up contributors or replacers valid in the target process’ configuration. In particular in the Tailoring perspective you can select a process that has several valid configurations with any of these and get all contributions/replacements that are valid in that configuration. Before this release you could only work with the process’ default configuration.
• The tailoring perspective now supports adding attachments to method elements that show with the respective process elements.  A wizard walks you selecting the attachment and then performs some magic under the covers of creating a contributor and synchronizing the process without the user having to do anything.
• Several fixes around using international characters and fonts in names. Despite those fixes, make sure that when you deploy RMC Web sites that use international characters such as umlauts in the names to configure your web servers to support the respective character sets used.
• Improved loading times of the published Web site, in particular when loading the first page.
• Fixed the issue that the rich text editor’s cursor and scroll area would jump to the top of the text every time you would save, indent text, or drag elements into the editor to create links.
• Fixed miscellaneous bugs around Search in RMC, roll-ups in the published site, contributing attachments, broken report templates introduced in ifix2, missing roles imported from WBM, and many more.

Do you live in Southern California? If yes, then you could see three RMC development team members (Bruce MacIsaac, Kelli Houston, and myself ) present this Thursday in a free “Rational Comes to You” event the latest around RMC, process modeling, best development practices, and government. The event is hosted by our business partner Noblestar and also features presentations around Noblestar’s approach for realizing enterprise process with RMC, a presentation on Jazz, as well as presentations from UP Mentors on process implementation. Go here for the agenda and to register.

There is a new three part training video available on developerWorks. Part 1 of this demo steps you through downloading and installing a trial copy of Rational® Method Composer, and covers some of the basics of method composition. Part 2 shows how to create the new method content needed to create a method configuration for a Rational Unified Process-based software delivery process. Part 3 defines the delivery process, then shows how to publish the completed configuration to a Web site.

See it here: “Get started with Rational Method Composer”, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

“Skins” is a new capability in RMC 7.2 that allows you to modify the look-and-feel of the published Web site to your requirements. It has been added to the 7.2 release as a response to RMC user’s requests for being able to make specific changes to the presentation of processes in html. Some user wanted to change the order in which information is presented on the various pages, others wanted to omit some of the presented information all together, many wanted to change the styles such as fonts and colors to match their company’s guidelines, or others even wanted to use a different terminology in places (e.g. call an ‘activity’ a ‘procedure’ instead). All of these changes can be made to the published site using Skins.

The following tutorial called “Customizing Publication Skins in IBM Rational Method Composer 7.2” will teach you how the most common scenarios for creating your own custom skins that reflect your company’s Web style guide or just your own personal taste.

Have you played with the integration of the Eclipse Birt report designer into Rational Method Composer 7.2, yet? If not then check out this new two part tutorial on Developer Works that will get you started:

1. “Using BIRT reports with IBM Rational Method Composer: Getting started.“
2. “Using BIRT reports with IBM Rational Method Composer: An intermediate-level example of creating BIRT reports“

This new integration allows you to present content managed in RMC in a completely user-defined way. The example developed in the tutorials show you how to create reference tables for your elements. Other applications could be to create index cards for your key tasks and work products or to delineate and publish your process as a PDF document. RMC ships with a lot of predefined report templates that you can use as a starting point. The first tutorial shows you how to find and use them. The second tutorial focuses how to do your own report from scratch.

Are you modeling formal business processes using Websphere Business Modeler? Do you need to provide a comprehensive human readable documentation of these processes, for example want to publish an operational manual that document your processes with natural language text?

If yes then check out this new white paper called “Achieving consistency between business process models and operational guides – How Rational and WebSphere software enable enterprise documentation in SOA environment” written by my colleagues Greg Rader and Chinh Vo that describes how to use the new integration between Rational Method Composer and Websphere Business Modeler to do exactly that.