The Process Practice

One of the cool new features in EPF Composer 1.2 (as well as RMC 7.2) is that they support shell sharing with Eclipse 3.3. So, if you already have Eclipse 3.3 on your machine you can install EPF Composer just right into it. Just copy-paste everything from EPFC’s features and plugins directories into the respective directories of Eclipse 3.3 and start it. (It will prompt you to override files, but if you use the Eclipse and EPF release versions it will just override the same files. If you do this with updated versions of Eclipse, check which files you are overriding one by one).You can now take advantage of useful Eclipse plugins for EPF Composer. For example, you can use Mylyn to directly and graphically search, modify, and create bugzillas on bugs.eclipse.org. See this screen shot for an example.

All you need to do is to open the Mylyn views inside your authoring view. The “Task Repositories” view already has bugs.eclipse.org pre-configured. All you have to do is to add is you username and password (double-click). The Task List shows bugs that yo manually added here. Click on the little arrow symbol on the right and “Search Repository..” to run a query. You add the bugs to your list via a right-click on the search results. Very handy extension.

Go here to learn more about Mylyn: http://www.eclipse.org/mylyn/

Get Eclipse 3.3 here: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Get the new EPF Composer 1.2 here (get the latest nightly builds, which fixes some bugs in the release version): http://www.eclipse.org/epf/downloads/tool/epf1.2.0_downloads.php

This week the OMG SPEM Finalization Task Force finished its work and we produced an updated version of the SPEM 2.0 specification that incorporates fixes for all reported issues. Go here to download the latest specification document from the OMG server. If you are interested in the models then you can get the meta-model files here (in CMOF and Rational Software Modeler 7 format) and the UML 2 Profile here (in XMI and IBM Rational Software Modeler 7 format).

If you are interested in the issues that were addressed in the final adopted specification (get the old adopted spec here) you can download and review the FTF’s report which we are going to present at the upcoming OMG meeting in Jacksonville end of September.

This should be the final activity to finalize SPEM 2.0 and it should then be ready for publication as a formal OMG specification.

We will be releasing IBM Rational Method Composer version 7.2 very soon. Our incredibly productive development team is hard at work fixing the last few bugs and preparing the release for end of September. This will be the biggest update for this product since its first release. It will support many new capabilities such as Reporting using the Eclipse Birt report designer and engine, a new Process Tailoring perspective for project managers, improved and new integrations with IBM Rational Portfolio Manager and IBM Webshpere Business Modeler as well as many new scalability and usability improvements.

I will use this blog to talk a little bit more about the new capabilities in the next few weeks leading up to the launch. In the meantime, you could check-out the overview presentation to RMC 7.2 that I gave at Rational Software Development Conference (RSDC 07) in June. See the abstract here and download the slides from here.

The slides are inside a 50MB zip file which includes in addition to the PDF file a directory of Flash recordings demo’ing the new feature. To view these recordings just drag them into a web browser. You need to have the Flash Player installed on your machine.

My colleague Ricardo Balduino and I gave an update to what is new and noteworthy in the Eclipse Process Framework. Ricardo gave a general overview to the OpenUP 1.0 release and the revamped eclipse.org/epf Web site and I gave a walkthrough and demo to the new features in EPF Composer 1.2. Check-out the recording of this presentation here. Download just the slides from here.

My name is Peter Haumer. I am a software architect working for IBM Rational on the Rational Method Composer as well as the Eclipse Process Framework as a committer. I also work in the OMG on a SPEM 2.0 submission. (See this page for a short bio.)

This is my personal blog in which I want to provide background knowledge, FAQs, tips & tricks, as well my thoughts on everything related to development processes. I will especially focus on the areas that I am personally involved in such as RMC, EPF, and SPEM2, but might also venture into related areas such as discussing concrete process frameworks that I am interested in (e.g RUP, OpenUP, Scrum, XP).