The Process Practice

The new version 7.5 of Rational Method Composer is available today. Despite its version number this is a major new release of this modeling environment and framework. The most important addition is all new content referred to as IBM Practices, as well as tool features around practices that allow you to create and manage your own agile mashups. Find in there core agile practices that you know from literature and allow you to assemble processes that combine the best of approaches such as Scrum, XP, OpenUP. In addition, we provide practices that allow you to scale up your agile development projects based on IBM’s own experience in doing agile development work in very large globally distributed development projects. Every practice also provides guidance for implementing it into your organization as well as and metrics to use to self-assess how successfully you adopt each practice. See the image below for lists of the most important practices available for scaling agile development.

New IBM Practices available in RMC 7.5

Use the new RMC process builder perspective to intuitively browse and select these practices using a simple shopping cart paradigm to assemble and publish a Web site to get you started. Then evolve these practices using RMC to make them your practices that reflect your way of working or add your own.

In addition to the support for practices we provide many new other capabilities and enhancements addressing many customer requests such as command line publishing, spell checking, a graphical image map editor, tagging, query-based categories, an integration with Rational Asset Manager, and many more. Check out the official annonucement document for more details on the new features. Also watch this space for additional collateral that we are providing on DeveloperWorks and ibm.com around IBM Practices and RMC in the coming days and weeks.

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.

After almost three years since our initial specification submission to the OMG I am proud to announce that the formal Software and Systems Process Engineering Meta-Model 2.0 specification is now officially available on the OMG Web server. Please, go and get it here: http://www.omg.org/spec/SPEM/2.0/.

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.