The Process Practice

An update release to RMC 7.5 was announced today. Find out about the details here.

The Open Group released the TOGAF 9 specification, which now includes an official EPF Composer Method Plug-in. Go to this article on ZDNet to learn about all the details.

The RMC team released ifix2 for Rational Method Composer 7.5 today. Use IBM Installation Manager to download and install the update.

The most important addition in this release is the inclusion of translations of the IBM Practices to German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Korean. Contact tech support or your local tech rep to find out how to get these new translations. In addition to the translations the update fixes a number of minor bugs around variability, spell-check, inconsistencies when publishing, and WBM export. See the readme in the installation directory after the update for the complete list. Plus, it ships with the RAM client for version 7.1.1, which allows you to connect to the latest RAM server version.

[updated 03/25]

Our friends from Noblestar organized another public event in Costa Mesa, CA where we present overviews to all of Rational’s Jazz-based products and of course RMC. Rational’s CTO Martin Nally will be there as well as many product managers and top experts of the products presented. See the annoucement below and if you are in the area on March 2nd you can sign up for it here.

IBM Rational

proudly presents
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
The Jazz Ensemble
Live at Carnegie Hall

IBM FileNet Office
Carnegie Hall
3545 Harbor Boulevard
Costa Mesa, CA 92626-1437

“The Jazz platform is a new technology initiative from Rational that allows the people, data and processes of software development to be integrated more tightly at the same time that software teams become more complex and distributed. Innovative and modern, the Jazz architecture is designed to integrate existing tools as well as enable new tools we could not implement before. Learn how the Jazz platform, the Jazz integration architecture and Jazz products can improve collaboration, transparency and automation of software development.” – Martin Nally, IBM Fellow, CTO, IBM Rational

Sponsored by IBM, Noblestar, Global Rational User Group Community.

The “Method Authoring Method” is a collection of practices, method content, and processes created with Rational Method Composer that describe how to develop all of these things with RMC. In other words and as a the name says it already: it provides methods for doing methods. This collection of practices covers topic areas that range from ways of eliciting and sketching methods, over how to use RMC to model processes, to a reference process model architecture for managing interchangeable sets of practices and process on a very large scale.

We now offer different packages and pre-published configurations of this content for different audiences:

1. First of all there is an open source version of this content on the Eclipse Process Framework homepage that focuses on the scope of the open source practices of the Eclipse Process Framework.  Download it here and preview it here on EPF Wiki.
2. Then there are two extended versions of this content focusing on the additional capabilities of Rational Method Composer and the way IBM’s commercial practices content is organized. They require an IBM Rational Method Composer license and can be downloaded from IBM’s DeveloperWorks here.

We released the first bug fix release for IBM Rational Method Composer 7.5 last night. Go and get it by running IBM Installation Manager and clicking the Update button. After the install you can find a list with all the issues addressed in the Readme file inside the installation directory. This ifix does not only fix the tool, but also a few issues in the Practices method library and published configurations. Therefore, the download is a bit larger than normal.

Key changes are:

• Converting the practice library to a workspace library now also converts tags and process builder definition files
• We improved the presentation of Practice guidance pages in both skins (updated the Relationships table, cleaned up the string resources used)
• Added a few more string resources in the skins files (such as the types of elements used in rich text hyperlinks or the relationship sub-folder in the navigation tree)
• Some fixes for the ClearCase integration (renaming plug-ins in workspace libraries, fixed new Clean Resources function when using CC)
• Work product descriptor pages now show sub-artifacts when including their method content
• Method content element guidance is not replicated to its descriptors anymore: RMC now enforces that a descriptor only lists additional guidance references in respect to the linked method element and does not duplicate such guidance entries during synchronization anymore
• Refined our double-byte character support in URLs (RMC now distinguishes signs like spaces and plus signs from double-byte codes in urls that start with %20)
• Added the missing “supporting plug-in” flags in Practice library and republished all out-of-the-box Practices configurations
• Spell checker fixed for RMC on Linux operation systems

Note, that we also made fixes and improvements for both skins. So if you have your own skins defined make sure you merge in all our changes into your skin files using a compare-merge tool.

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.]

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.