The Process Practice

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.

I just started a new page on this blog that lists some resources that I find useful and worth sharing. This is intended to be a growing list as I just started adding the most obvious references. Check the ‘last update’ date to keep track when additions have happened.

Click on the tab above or if you read this via a feed go here: http://blog.haumer.net/resources.

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.