The Process Practice

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